Getting started with VCF Part 14 – Connecting vRA to NSX-T WLD (alternate method)

In my most recent VMware Cloud Foundation post (part 13), I highlighted the fact that if you used NSX-T as the networking platform for your workload domain (WLD), you could not attach vRealize Automation (vRA) to such a WLD via SDDC Manager. In that previous post, I showed how to manually deploy the vRA proxy agents on the Proxy VMs. These Proxy VMs were already deployed via SDDC Manager as part of the overall vRA deployment through SDDC Manager, but the agents were not installed at this point. If NSX-V was used as the networking platform for the WLD, then…

Getting started with VCF Part 13 – Connect vRealize to WLDs

I’m still on my VMware Cloud Foundation v3.9 journey. My latest task was to connect my vRealize Components to my Workload Domains (WLDs). In part 2 I deployed vRealize Log Insight (vRLI) and vRealize Operations (vROps), and then in part 3 and part 4, I rolled out vRealize Automation. Now I wanted to connect them to the WLDs that I had rolled out previously. SDDC Manager makes this really easy. In just a couple of clicks I had connected vRLI and vROps to both VI WLDs. However, on trying to connect my vRealize Automation (vRA) 7.6 to my WLDs, I…

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…

New vRealize Automation, Cloud Assembly integration with SPBM

At VMworld last year, Duncan Epping and I presented on the power of Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM for short). You can find all of the slides and recordings here. One of the demos we used in the presentation was deploying virtual machines via vRealize Automation, and showing how to consume a storage policy on vSAN. This was using a vRealize Automation plugin, and to be honest, it was a little bit challenging to get it to work. And it wasn’t really a VMware plugin per-se, but something developed by our field team. Today, I’m pleased to announce that we…