Getting started with VCF Part 4 – vRA Deployment

After taking care of all of the prerequisite steps highlighted in my VMware Cloud Foundation Part 3 post, we are now ready to deploy vRealize Automation (vRA) via vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (vRSLM) in the VCF SDDC Manager. This will be a relatively shorter “show and tell” post, which will take you through the deployment steps. It will also show you how you can monitor the progress of the vRA deployment. The complete deployment does take some time since there are quite a number of virtual appliances and virtual machines that need to be rolled out for vRA (11 in…

Getting started with VCF Part 3 – vRealize Automation Prerequisites

Continuing on my journey of ramping up on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), my next step is to go through the deployment of vRealize Automation. This is again done via the vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (vRSLM). We’ve already seen how to deploy out vRealize Operations through vRSLM in part 2. And in part 1, we saw the initial VCF management domain deployment. In this post we will take a detailed look at what needs to be put in place in order to be able to deploy vRealize Automation (vRA). Now, there are quite a number of prerequisites needed before we can…

Getting started with VCF Part 2 – vRealize Suite

Following on from my first post on getting started with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), the next thing that you will probably want to do is configure the vRealize Suite in SDDC Manager. Now, as part of the initial VCF deployment, vRealize Login Insight is already deployed.  Therefore in this step, we will deploy two components – the vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager and vRealize Operations. There are two pieces of information that we will need before we start. The first of these is the ‘Bill of Materials’ to tell us which versions of software are required for our particular release of…

Introducing Project Magna – Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for vSphere self-driving operations

At VMworld 2018, Pat Gelsinger made reference to a project that was looking to use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to create self driving operations for the vSphere stack. At VMworld 2019 last week, we were given a tech preview of the first iteration of this effort, called Project Magna. There were a number of VMworld break-out sessions dedicated to this effort, and I will reference them near the end of this post. However, this first tech preview is focused solely on hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), namely vSAN. It is an interesting choice to start with, since we position vSAN as…

A first look at vRealize Network Insight for Kubernetes

Regular readers will know that I have been spending quite a bit of time recently looking at Kubernetes running on vSphere. I’ve written a number of posts on the storage side of things, which you can read here as part of my 101 series. I also posted about how you can setup vRealize Operations Manager 7.5 and add the Management Pack for Container Monitoring. This provide some really good dashboards for examining the state of your K8s clusters, as well as detailed breakdowns into K8s node VM health and performance (CPU, Memory, DIsk IO). Not only that, but you can…

NSX-T Adapter for vROps – Collection Failed

Very short post – simply to highlight an issue I came across and could not find any external reference to. I added a new adapter to my vRealize Operations Manager 7.5 to monitor my NSX-T 2.3.1 deployment. The adapter was the NSX-T 2.0 Adapter. Soon after configuring it to communicate to my NSX Manager, the Collection Status for the adapter changed to Object down and the Adapter Status changes to Collection Failed. Initially I thought it as some interoperability issue, but that wasn’t the case. I went ahead and looked at the dashboard, and it reported that the Adapter Instance…

Configuring vROps 7.5 Management Pack for Container Monitoring

The vROps Management Pack for Container Monitoring is something that I had been meaning to install and configure for a while now, but I just haven’t had a chance until very recently. If you didn’t know. VMware’s vRealize Operations has a Management Pack for Container Monitoring. This includes adapters for both the Pivotal Container Service (PKS) as well as Kubernetes. In my environment I had already deployed PKS which I was then using for deploying my Kubernetes clusters. I found the official documentation a little light on what exact information was required for both the PKS Adapter and the Kubernetes…