Lifecycle ManagerLuckily that’s not true but vRealize Lifecycle Manager will enable SysAdmins to spend their time on service creation instead of installation and configuration of the platform. Now, quickly after the initial release on September 20th, VMware already released a new version of vRealize Lifecycle Manager. vRealize Lifecycle Manager allows you to quickly install and configure a brand new vRealize deployment or upgrade an existing vRealize environment. Besides that, vRealize Lifecycle Manager delivers health monitoring, patch management, configuration management, drift remediation and upgrades to the entire vRealize Suite.

vRealize Lifecycle Manager 1.1 now includes a set of essential features which should make this new product even more popular than it already is.

What’s New in vRealize Lifecycle Manager 1.1

  • In-product Marketplace
    The In-Product Marketplace allows you to browse and install VMware Marketplace content for all the vRealize products. It not only filters the content as for the available environments and product versions, but also notifies you of any updates to installed Marketplace content.
  • Configuration drift remediation
    Using Configuration Drift Remediation enhances the existing ability to view the configuration drift for an environment with remediation against good state capabilities.
  • Support for delete environment
    This is a feature which is in high demand and it allows you to delete an environment managed by vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager. You can optionally choose to delete the product deployments in the environment. In the initial release a failed import or installation would result in a failed environment which could not be deleted from the vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager interface.
  • Error handling and validation
    Enhancements to environment installations, upgrades, and retry logic.

In-product Marketplace

You can use vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager to search for and download content from the Marketplace. This enhances the time-to-market for vRealize products significantly. Imagine, deploying vRealize Automation using vRealize Lifecycle Manager and importing content form the Marketplace, maybe customise it and you’re in business.

Before you start, verify that you have performed an initial Marketplace sync to load Marketplace content.

  • Click Marketplace and click the All tab. vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager displays all content available for vRealize Suite in Marketplace.
  • To filter the list of available content by search terms, enter search terms into the Search text box.
  • To filter the list of available content by product, publisher, or technology, click Filter and select the appropriate filters.
  • Click View Details for to learn more about the downloadable content, including what products and version the content is compatible with, user ratings for the content, and a list of related content. Note: Free content is marked ‘FREE CONTENT’.
  • Click Download to download the content to vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager. The downloaded content appears on the Downloaded tab of the Marketplace page.
  • Click Marketplace and click the Downloaded tab.
  • Click the three dots in the upper right corner of the tile for the content to install, and click Install.
  • Select the data center and environment to install the content on and click [Install].

Configuration drift remediation

Configuration drift shows the changes in product configuration over time and allows you to revert a product to an earlier configuration state.

You can use this in multiple use cases:

  • Compliance management and reporting.
  • Testing vRealize Suite configuration changes in a separate environment.
  • Troubleshooting vRealize infrastructure issues.

vRealize Lifecycle Manager uses the product baseline to generate configuration drift reports that show how the current product configuration differs from the baseline configuration. To do this, simply save your known good/baseline configuration to a file. You can now generate a configuration drift report to view the changes in a product’s current configuration compared to the baseline you saved earlier. When generation a configuration drift report, you can select to get a full report or a report on just the configuration changes compare to the baseline.

How to do that?

  • Click Manage Private Clouds.
  • Click [DETAILS] for the environment the product to upgrade is part of.
  • Click the icon next to the name of the product and select Show Report.
  • Select an instance on the Drift TimeLine to view the configuration drift report for the date and time listed for the instance.
  • Select the view for the drift report.

Support for delete environment

This is a feature which is in high demand and it allows you to delete an environment managed by vRealize Lifecycle Manager. Deleting an environment removes the environment from vRealize Lifecycle Manager but does not delete the products in the environment. You can delete both successful and failed environment deployments. You cannot delete environments that are partially deployed and have not completed successfully or failed to deploy.

How to do that?

  • Click Manage Environments to delete a successfully installed environment, or click Home to delete a failed environment deployment listed under Recent Requests.
  • Click the three dots in the upper right corner of the environment tile, and select Delete Environment.
  • Select Delete related virtual machines from vCenter to delete all virtual machines associated with this environment from vCenter. If you do not select this option, all virtual machines associated with this environment remain in vCenter after the environment is deleted from vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager.
  • Select Delete related Windows machines to delete Windows machines associated with vRealize Automation this environment. This option is only available  if you choose to delete all related virtual machines from vCenter.
  • Click [DELETE].
  • If you chose to delete virtual machines associate with the environment, verify that the list of virtual machines to delete is correct, and click [CONFIRM DELETE]. Note: IaaS virtual machine names do not appear in this list.
  • Click [CLOSE].
The selected environment will now be removed from vRealize Lifecycle Manager. You can view the progress of the delete operation on the Requests page. If the delete operation fails, retry the delete operation without deleting virtual machines from vCenter, and remove the virtual machines from vCenter separately by using vCenter.

Requirements

Requirements Software Requirements

Verify that the system where you run vRealize Lifecycle Manager meets the following minimum software requirements:

  • vCenter Server 6.0 or 6.5
  • ESXi version 6.0 or 6.5

Hardware Requirements

Verify that the system where you run vRealize Lifecycle Manager meets the following minimum software requirements.

  • 2 vCPUs.
  • 16 GB memory.
  • 127 GB storage.

Supported products

vRealize Lifecycle Manager supports the following vRealize Suite products and product versions.

  • vRealize Automation 7.2 and 7.3.
  • vRealize Orchestrator 7.2 and 7.3 (embedded with vRealize Automation).
  • vRealize Business for Cloud 7.2.1, 7.3, and 7.3.1.
  • vRealize Operations Manager 6.5 and 6.6.1.
  • vRealize Log Insight 4.3 and 4.5.

Upgrade issue

If you attempt to do an upgrade from vRealize Lifecycle Manager 1.0 to 1.1, you might notice than when you click ‘Check Updates’ the product returns ‘There is no update available for vRealize Lifecycle Manager’.

Lifecycle Manager

To fix this issue follow these steps:

SSH to LCM appliance and execute the following command:

sed -i -e 's/aeee721e-9143-11e7-abc4-cec278b6b50a/dbdb0e11-07fe-4baa-9429-291b7e689693/g' /opt/vmware/var/lib/vami/update/provider/provider-deploy.xml

Attempt the upgrade again.

 

vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager is a single appliance which you can download here