A low budget SMB environment – A HowTo (Part 1: Parts and budget)
As the last days of 2015 tick away, I wanted to share how I came about my new lab environment without spending a fortune. Some of you might want to set some goals for the new year and this might be some interesting input. My…
Installing the Windows agent for Log Insight
Log Insight can collect data from various sources as I explained earlier. All systems push their data to the central server, or by an agent in the operating system. There are two agents available for deployment, a Linux agent and a Windows agent. Both agents…
Configuring Log Insight for vSphere Integration
In this article I will help you to set up your first source, vRealize Log Insight for vSphere integration. vRealize Log Insight can integrate with vSphere to automatically import events from vCenter server and logs from ESXi hosts. If you missed the first articles in the…
Getting started with vRealize Log Insight
VMware has a lot of tools these days. From the tools for virtualization all kinds of workloads to managing all that in an automated manner. In that last category VMware also has a tool called vRealize Log Insight. vRealize Log Insight, together with vRealize Operations gives…
Setup provisioning of vCloud Air workloads
You may think you know Blueprint creation but this part differs a bit from a traditional blueprint in vRealize Automation. Normally in vRealize Automation, a single blueprint is created, published and added to the Catalog. The provisioning of vCloud Air workloads is a bit different,…
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…