Infoblox & vRealize Automation, IP Address Management (IPAM) made easy
Do you remember…
Back in the days when we all had lots of physical servers to manage you probably remember having several lists to write down server specific information such as rack, position, network patches, server name, IP address etc. etc. A lot has changed since the introduction of virtualization and most of this information has become irrelevant. Except for IP Address Management (IPAM), which still most customers do use Excel sheets for.
Manually provisioning DNS records and IP Addresses requires multiple handoffs between various teams and adds hours, days, or even weeks to the delivery time of new cloud/virtualized deployments. In addition to the delays, a lack of automation for these core network services causes inconsistency, outages, and security risks when provisioning and destroying VMs.
Once deployed, tracking virtual resources and corresponding network components creates significant overhead and results in issues with compliance, serviceability, and scalability. When VMs are destroyed, many organizations fail to clean up the DNS records and IP addresses leading to stale data. This puts an unnecessary burden on network admins who have to manually re-claim IP Addresses and update DNS records in an ongoing attempt to avoid service disruptions due to IP Address conflicts or DNS misconfiguration.
Automating IPAM
To address these challenges, Infoblox has developed native integration with VMware vRealize Automation/Orchestrator fully automating IPAM and DNS provisioning.
Infoblox stores and manages the network properties needed to connect VMs to the network, acting as a single, authoritative system for network configuration management. As VMs are created by vRealize automation, the Infoblox VMware integration automatically assigns IP Addresses and creates DNS records for each network interface on the VM. This data in addition to corresponding network properties such as default gateway, netmask, and DNS server settings are injected directly into the VM, dramatically reducing VM provisioning time. When VMs are destroyed in vRealize, the IP Addresses and DNS records are de-allocated and become available immediately for use by new VMs. Every IP address assignment and DNS record change is tracked in Infoblox, providing visibility into virtual assets, and ensuring consistent network resource utilization across the enterprise.
In this multi-part blogpost I will show you how to setup Infoblox, use it together with Microsoft DNS and integrate it with VMware vRealize Automation.
Requirements:
- Infoblox appliance installed and running NIOS 7.2.x/7.3.x or 8.0.x/8.1.x
- Infoblox (trial) licenses installed for; vNIOS, Grid, DNS, MS Management and Cloud Network Automation
- IPAM plugin for VMware 4.3.0
- VMware vRealize Automation 7.3 with embedded vRealize Orchestrator 7.3
- VMware vCenter Server 5.5 or 6.0 (6.5 is official not supported but does work)
- Microsoft Domain Controller with integrated DNS
Part 1 – Infoblox NIOS setup
Part 2 – Install Infoblox plugin in VMware vRealize Orchestrator
Part 3 – Setup Infoblox IPAM endpoint
Part 4 – VMware vRealize Automation IPAM setup
Other articles in the series vRealize Automation:
- Infoblox & vRealize Automation, Setup IPAM endpoint
- Infoblox & vRealize Automation, Install Infoblox IPAM plugin
- Setup provisioning of vCloud Air workloads
- Setup a vCloud Air Endpoint in vRealize Automation
- Setup Postgres database high availability for vRealize Automation
- Setup vRealize Automation Cost profiles & currency
- Speed up vRealize Automation life cycle updates
- Configure vRealize Automation not to delete virtual machines
- Track infrastructure changes with vRealize Automation Data Collection
- MS SQL high availability support for vRealize Automation
- Setup the vRealize Automation prerequisites for IaaS
- vRealize Automation: How to …
- Downgrade the vRealize Automation license
- vRealize Automation 7 – New Architecture & Installation
- vRealize Automation 7 – Improved Authentication
- vRealize Automation 7 – Converged Blueprints
- vRealize Automation 7 – LifeCycle Extensibility
- How to transfer vRealize Automation payload to Orchestrator
- Automation is not difficult with vRealize Automation 7
- vRA custom host name using Orchestrator and Event Broker
- How to deliver Database-as-a-Service with vRealize Automation
- Prepare Windows for vRA software deployment
- Missing endpoints after upgrading to vRealize Automation 7.3
- How to run Containers as a Service – Part 1
- How to run Containers as a Service – Part 2
- Infoblox & vRealize Automation, IP Address Management (IPAM) made easy
- How to run Containers as a Service – Secure Docker communications
- Create a new database user using vRealize Automation XaaS
- Infoblox & vRealize Automation, Infoblox NIOS setup
- Infoblox & vRealize Automation, vRA setup
- vRealize Automation failed requests monitoring
- vRealize Automation 7.2 released
- How to specify a deployment target when using vRealize Automation
- vRealize Suite just became a lot easier with Lifecycle Manager
- LAMP Stacks made easy with VMware and Puppet
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Dimitri de Swart
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