Setup a vCloud Air Endpoint in vRealize Automation
Every company nowadays want to do ‘something’ with cloud services. For this POC I had one use case proving we could deploy workloads to vCloud Air just like you would deploying the to the local vSphere infrastructure. vCloud Air is available as a subscription service…
Setup Postgres database high availability for vRealize Automation
Earlier in this series, I discussed Microsoft SQL database high availability but when deploying a fully distributed vRealize Automation environment, you also need to protect the Postgres database on the vRealize Automation appliance. In the past, when you wanted high availability for the vCloud Automation Center/vRealize…
VMware Tools unleashed
Until recently new builds of the VMware Tools where tied to the ESXi builds. After updating an ESXi host you would have the ability apply a new build of the VMware Tools to your virtual machines. Now VMware decided to untie the build releases, given…
Configure vRealize Automation not to delete virtual machines
During the POC we did a demo of the default vRealize Automation lease/archive/delete-process which I discussed yesterday. After seeing this the customer is worried that virtual machines with or without an archive period configured get deleted during holiday periods. So their question is, ‘is it…
Speed up vRealize Automation life cycle updates
During the vRealize Automation life cycle of an item it passes various states. The life cycle of a virtual machine in vRealize Automation is made up of the so called Master Workflow. The Master Workflow is a collection of the following six top level workflow states: Request…
Setup vRealize Automation Cost profiles & currency
When setting up costing in vRealize Automation you can use cost profiles and storage cost profiles to provide cost information in the Catalog. First, you have to associate cost with compute resources which essentially is a pool of clusters available as an endpoint in your vRealize Automation environment. In vRealize…
MS SQL high availability support for vRealize Automation
With a vRealize Automation Distributed setup, we are able to create a highly available vRealize Automation environment with redundant vRA appliances, IaaS Servers and Orchestrators behind load balancers. But what about the MS SQL high availability for the Iaas Server(s)? Lately I had some discussion on…
Setup the vRealize Automation prerequisites for IaaS
When you’re setting up your vRealize Automation environment, you start of easy with the vRealize Automation appliance. After this you’re probably thinking it will be ‘a peace of cake‘, ‘a walk in the park‘ or any other metafor that’s harder to remember than the vRA…
vRealize Automation: How to …
Since I started at VMware Benelux in January 2015 the learning curve has been a steep one. In my previous life I had been working with the products in the vRealize Suite. I’ve done multiple designs and real life implementations including vRealize Operations but there was…
VMware NSX 6.2: Support for Multiple vCenters
VMware NSX 6.2 dropped yesterday with some pretty awesome features. I’ll be going through most features in separate posts and this one is for the Cross-vCenter feature. Before 6.2, the NSX Manager and vCenter had a one to one relationship, making certain dual datacenter designs…
Manually preparing ESXi hosts for VMware NSX
Usually when installing VMware NSX, the Update Manager takes care of ESXi host preparation. It takes a few VIB packages from the NSX Manager and pushes those to the ESXi hosts to prepare them for VXLAN, the distributed firewall and the distributed router. It can…
Integrating VMware NSX with VMware vRealize Log Insight
VMware vRealize Log Insight is a log analyser with capabilities to receive logs from regular syslog (so every device that can send syslog over the network) and from agents for Windows and Linux. Mostly every device can be configured to send logs to it and…
How to install Micro Segmentation on your vSphere cluster – a Step-by-step guide
Micro segmentation is probably the number one reason for companies with vSphere to purchase NSX. This feature inserts a packet filter in between your VMs. A filter you can configure centrally, link to single VMs, groups of VMs, kinds of VMs and specify according to your…
Removing VMware Data Security after vShield to NSX upgrade
An existing vShield environment can be upgraded to a full NSX environment, as described in my VCIX post “Upgrade VMware NSX Components”. All vShield components can be upgraded, except for one; vShield Data Security. The documentation states: NSX Data Security does not support a direct…
vCenter Server 6 Availability Guide
vCenter Server has become a mission critical part of most virtual infrastructures. It can be a single point of failure if it is not designed for availability. vCenter Server 6 has many changes relating to vCenter Server and its components and careful consideration has to…