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…

DR of VMware vCenter Orchestrator

Over the past month or so, I’ve been looking at disaster recovery of some of the vCloud Suite components. My experiences of using vSphere Replication and Site Recovery Manager to protect and recover vCenter Operations Manager in the event of a disaster can be found here and here. Now it was time to look at vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) to see if that could be protected and recovered. In this configuration, I deployed vCO in HA mode, meaning that there were two vCenter Orchestrator servers, one running and one in standby mode. The database for vCO was an external SQL Server…

Some weird VCO client login messages

I’ve recently been looking at VCO, our VMware vCenter Orchestrator product, more from a High Availability and Disaster Recovery point of view rather than a usability perspective. I admit I have little or no orchestration skills whatsoever, but there are plenty of other blogs and educational web sites out there to help you get started with VCO. Anyhow, whilst getting the product up and running, I hit a couple of snags that I thought would be interesting to share.

vCloud Automation Center and vSphere Data Protection Interop

This post is a follow on to a previous post I did on vCops and VDP interop. In this scenario, I am going to try to use vSphere Data Protection (VDP), which is VMware’s Backup/Restore product, to back up and restore a vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) v6.0.1. and vCenter Orchestration (VCO) v5.5 deployment. In this particular scenario, there are nine virtual machines making up my vCAC and VCO deployment. VCO has been deployed in a HA configuration, which accounts for two VMs. The others make up the DEM, Manager, Web, vCAC, SSO and various databases for vCloud Automation Center.