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