If you have just started working with vRealize Automation, you will notice that you can apply custom properties to many elements. While this is great and add a lot of flexibility to the product and make it easier to customize the product to do things differently in the way you desire. It can get confusing which property will precede/over write the other one, if a duplicate property with a different value was assigned at a different element/level. In this post, I wanted to highlight the order of Precedenc for Custom Properties in vRA, so you can predict your results.

The full order of precedence for custom properties is that any property value specified in a source later in the list overrides values for the same property specified in sources earlier in the list. The order is shown in the following list:

Order of applying Custom Properties, later one over write earlier one:

1. Build Profile
2. Blueprint
3. Business Group
4. Compute resource
5. Reservation
6. Endpoint
7. Runtime

Note: Please note only Build Profile, Blueprint, and Business Group custom properties are assigned at the request time, while most other custom properties (Comput resources, reservation, & Endpoint) are assigned during provisioning, as they are not being assigned till the provisioning process has been started.… Read More

If you worked with vRA 6.x and earlier, you will definetly know that replacing certs was a very involving process. The great news is that vRA 7 has eliminated most of the work required to do so and automated a good part of the process. Unfortunately, this is not clearly documented in vRA 7 documentation, although in my opinion this is one of the major improvements in vRA 7.0. As I have discovered those improvement the hard way through going through engineering and support, I thought It’s worth sharing as it can save you tons of time.

Let’s start by the scenario where you have setup the vRealize Automation 7.x system up and running, and you want to replace your certificates. Let’s assume you have already generated the certs for the different services, but if you did not and need help with that keep reading as I will give you guidance on that later on in this article. Below is how to replace the certs of each of the services making up your vRA 7.0.

– SSO/Identity Appliance: As vRA 7.0 does not make use of vCenter SSO any more and it moved to embeded vIDM, you will not have to worry about the certs of this any more.… Read More

vRealize Automation 7 converged blueprint is now offering you the capabilities to go beyond VMs deployment to being able to design/deploy a full application stack. In order to enable application deployment in vRA, you will need to install vRA 7 bootstrap in your VM template. In this post, I will cover how to install vRA 7.0 bootstrap into your Windows & Linux VM templates.

Note: vRA 7.0 enterprise license is required to use the software deployment capabilities of vRA 7.0. If you have a license that does not include this, you will need to depend solely on the Gugent to run your scripts in similar fashion to what was done in previous versions of vRA, which I have document previously at: vCAC Guest Agent Installation

Note: In vRealize Automation 7.1 and higher the download link of the Guest Agent, Bootstrap Agent and so on has changed from the links used in the below article to https://vRealize_VA_Hostname_fqdn/software/index.html. 

vRA 7 bootstrap installation in Windows:

(Certs)

1. Make sure your root cert is trusted by your template.
2. Make sure your Manager Service cert is trusted by your template as well.

(Gugent)

1. Download the Gugent installer from https://vRealize_VA_Hostname_fqdn:5480/installer/GuestAgentInstaller_x64.exe. The download link has changed to https://vRealize_VA_Hostname_fqdn/software/index.html in vRealize Automation 7.1

One of the questions I get often asked by customers is how to modify vRA e-mail templates. To be honest the most one customers usually care to modify is the Approval e-mail to include more information than what is provided in the out of the box template. In this article, I will show you how to simply modify the vRA Approval e-mail to include additional custom properties. I will not drill into more advanced e-mail modification topics to keep this as simple as possible and get you straight to the point if that all you needed to do, though I will have more advanced vRA e-mail template modifications links at the end of this post.

First, you will need to upload the vRA e-mail templates to vRA using the below steps:

1. Download the 2088805_vrealize_automation.tar.gz file from KB208805
   • Windows: Use a program such as WinSCP to copy the 2088805_vrealize_automation.tar.gz to the VMware vRealize Automation
   • Linux: Run these commands:scp 2088805_vrealize_automation.tar.gz root@vCAC VA:/
     ssh root@vCACVA
     cd /
     tar -xvzf 2088805_vrealize_automation.tar.gz
     find /vcac -type d -exec chmod o+rx {} \;
     find /vcac -type f -exec chmod o+r {} \;
2. Restart VMware vRealize Automation by running this command:service vcac-server restart.

The above steps should get you to a position where you are ready to modify the vRA e-mail templates as needed, and changes to these templates going forward will take effect without needing to restart the service, but might take up to 2 minutes to see the changes.… Read More

After installing the vRA 6.2.2 Gugent into our Windows 2012 R2 template, blueprint deployment started to time out. As I had followed the exact steps I have previously used to install the Gugent for quite few customers before which in turn I have already documented on my following blog post: vRA Guest Agent Installation, I was surprised with the issue and thought to document the issue and resolution of it in this blog post in case others encounter it. Before I start, just few words of the environment versions:

vRA: 6.2.2
Gugent: 6.2.2
vCenter: 6.0
ESXi: 6.0
VMware Tools: 6.0
OS: Windows 2012 R2

While above these are the exact versions I have seen the issue with, you might face it with previous or future versions, as I am not sure yet which versions this specifically apply to, I wanted to ensure to point out the exact versions where I have observed it. Below is the timeout error I saw in vRA while trying to deploy from a blueprint that uses the Gugent: “Request failed: Machine vttest001: Timeout Customizing Guest OS.”

The error logs within the vRA portal was not providing me with enough info to debug the error with, so I started digging into one of the machines deployed through the problematic blueprint and after digging around I have found the following error in Windows Applications event log:

“faulting application name: DynamicOps.agent.guest.exe… Read More

While doing the usual vRA 6.2.2 large deployment distributed install, and after everything in the installation went smoothly without any errors, the vRA infrastructure tab was not working. Checking the vRA Services through the vRA Appliance VAMI, and noticed all of my services are up and running as  expected with its status being registered, beside the iaas-service which its status was left blank. Look at the below screenshot and notice where the service column ” iaas-service        com.vmware.csp.iaas.blueprint.service” status being blank.

Going through every test I can think of, I could find no meaningful error in any of the logs, till I opened my infrastructure tab again but in Chrome this time and rather than getting the usual 404 error it was giving me earlier the below message came up: Invalid Argument. Host name may not be null

After a bit of digging/research, I have found out that the VIP names the customer is using included under scores which is not supported by vRA for both hostnames or VIP names. This has been documented in the vRA 6.2 Installation and configuration document here as well in KB2086553.

Resolution for this issue: You will need to avoid this scenario before hand, else you will have to redo the full installation.… Read More

When delivering a vRealize Automation 6.1 and prior in a distributed install, the recommendation was always to have an external vPostgres instance. This has changed in vRealize Automation 6.2 and it’s briefly touched upon in the vRA 6.2 reference architecture found at: vRealize Automation 6.2 reference Architecture. I wanted to make sure to highlight this, as many have missed this change and others are still wondering how it can be implemented or why this change. It’s important to mention as well, you can use this replication architecture for any version of vCAC/vRA that’s higher than 6.0.1.

Let’s start by highlighting the change, we are moving from having a separate/external vPostgres  machine to host the vPostgres (being a vRA appliance that is re-purposed to be used as vPostgres or a full vPostgres install) to using the internal built-in vRA Appliance vPostgres and replicate across the two vRA Appliances. The below image demonstrate this change:

So what do you get of moving to this new model? Actually there is few advantages of implementing your vRA 6.2 this way, below is couple of them.

1- You have less machines to manage by eliminating the extra one or two external vPostgres machines you needed in the 6.1… Read More

Lately, I have been getting a lot of questions about how to use the vCAC Gugent to run scripts within the guest OS of your deployed VM. While if you are deploying simple VMs using vCAC this use case might not sound obvious, it has a lot of uses to it in the real world. Before I go through how to get your vCAC Gugent or now called vRA Gugent (Guest Agent) to run scripts, let’s take few examples of why you want to do this:

– Imagine the use case where you want to assign an IP Address in a Guest OS that is not supported by VMware Customization tool. You can actually assign an IP Addess to it by running after deployment  script using the Guagent to change the IP Address of that machine. Actually while I had this post in mind for a while, it end up getting to my top priority today as a colleague was asking me about this use case scenario.

– Imagine the use case where you want to run some security scanning scripts after the OS was fully deployed. This is will be any easy way of doing it.

– Imaging the use case where you want to initialize a client or agent for application deployment/management tool (Ex: Puppet, Chef, Altiris, TSM Client, …)

– It can be even be used as a cheaper dirty way of deploying applications or services.… Read More