vRealize Automation 7.3 what’s new?

vRealize Automation 7.3 has been released today with tons of new capabilities and features (>20 Spotlight Features). In this post, I will highlight several of these new enhancements to introduce you to what you can get by upgrading to vRA 7.3. I hope this will help you find out if the features you are looking for is a part of this release. I know many on my list and my customers lists have been addressed, but there is always room for more.

Below is few important links to check to learn more about vRealize Automation 7.3:

vRealize Automation 7.3 new features:

Parameterized Blueprints to Enhance Reusability and Reduce Sprawl​

  • Introduced component profiles for defining both size and image attributes, enabling “T-shirt sizing” as a request item
    • Component profiles provided for image and virtual machine size including CPU, memory, and storage size
  • Efficiently manage blueprints by leveraging abstracted component profiles
  • Increase reusability while significantly reducing blueprint sprawl
  • Trigger approval policies on size or image conditions
  • Import or export of component profiles using vRealize CloudClient
  • Automatically substitute component profile values

In the past, I have seen the request for VMs “t-shirt sizing” coming up often.… Read More

vRealize Automation 7 Property Dictionary Relationship

In the past I have documented how to do vCloud Automation 6.x Property Dictionay and Property Dictionary relationship in a post that was well recieved and got quite popular which can be found at: vCAC 6 Property Dictionary Relationship. I have meant to do the same for vRA 7 Property Dictionary Relationship for sometime as it has dramatically changed from it’s 6.x days, but I had pushed it forward several times and finally got the time to get around it.

In this post, I am going to show you how to populate a dropdown menu created in vRA property dictionary from a vRO workflow. Further, I will show you how to filter it based on another dropdown as well. This is get very useful when you have two related dropdown in your vRealize Automation Request forum and would like to filter one of them based on the other dropdown selection.  It help you ensure only valid values are showing in the second dropdown menu making your request form more user friendly. Further, this same process can be used to populate the dropdown list from an external source like MS SQL or so on.

Before you start with this exercise, I would highly recommend you go through my past post to get an understanding of the terms used in this post: vCAC Custom Properties – Build Profiles(Renamed Property Groups in vRA 7.0)Read More

How to Configure vRealize Automation 7.x Management pack in vRealize Operations Manager

The installation of vRealize Operations Manager Management Pack for vRealize Automation is a popular ask due to the benefit of in depth monitoring of vRA offered by vROPs. The vRealize Automation Management Pack for vRealize Operations Manager is very quick to configure as long you know the steps and permissions required. In this post, I will show you how to easily start monitoring your vRA 7.x environment with vROPs. The steps below should get you setup in no time.

1- Download the vRealize Operations Manager Management Pack for vRealize Automation from VMware Solutions Exchange.

2- Log in to vRealize Operations Manager by using the administration console using the Admin user.

3- In the left pane of vRealize Operations Manager, click Administration and click Solutions.

vROPs Solution Tab before installing vRA Management Pack

4- Hit the Green Plus (Add management Pack button), then upload the downloaded management pack.

Installing vROPs management pack for vRealize Automation

5- Accept the EULA and hit next/install on the install screen, then wait for the plugin to complete installation.

6- When you have finished the installation of the vRA Management Pack for vROPs, the next step before you configure it, is to assign a service user proper permission to vRA to allow vROPs to connect/collect monitoring data from vRA. This user will need the following permissions: Tenant Administrator, IaaS Administrator,  Software Architect, and Fabric Group Admin.… Read More

vRA Installation Error: Another instance of the component is already installed on this server.

While I have been installing vRA lately as a part of a VMware Validated Design engagement using the Automated Deployment Tool, my vRA deployment tool failed as the DBA has not provided the right permissions on the SQL box required to install vRA. The error received at that moment was: “Error occurred while executing SQL file: User does not have permission to perform this action.”.  This error showed up in vCAC-Config.log file on the first IaaS web server.

The above error was pretty descriptive and easy to rectify by assigning a sysadmin role to my vRA user account used for the vRA installation as well provide it with a dbo role on the vRA database. I decided to go ahead and re-run my installation after I have resolved the permissions issue, and I started facing the following error, which I was not clear what’s going on initially: “Another instance of the component is already installed on this server.”

Here is what made this error initially confusing, it comes up as a part of SQL Database creation block. Below how the error looked as the installation was executing:

[root]  [INFO] ———————————————————————————————————————-
[root]  [INFO]         Installation of IaaS “db” component on host “vraweb01.vt.com” starts now
[root]  [INFO] ———————————————————————————————————————-
[root]  [INFO] Executing db Installation command:
[root]  /usr/sbin/vra-command execute –node 574C2057-4BEE-40E0-A163-AD86A1FTT32A install-db –SqlServer vtvrasql01.vt.com,1433… Read More

F5 load balancer common misconfigurations for vRA 7 Distributed setup

Working with several customers to build vRealize Automation 7.x in production environment has exposed me to many vRA Distributed installs that involved the use of Load Balancers. There seems common mistakes that customers fall for when configuring load balancers for vRA 7.x distributed environments that cause the installation to fail or the setup not to function as intended. Here I wanted to highlight few of these. While I will be focusing on F5 in here, these mistakes can affect other load balancers as well.

vRealize Automation 7 F5 load balancer

1- Utilize the load balancer VIP for initial installation

Several customers try to use their load balancer VIP during vRA installation. While if setup perfectly this will work, a small mistake with the VIP configuration can make the installation and configuration of vRealize Automation feel impossible. For this I would recommend you create the VIP DNS record and just point it to your first nodes. Complete your vRA installation and configuration and only after confirming your setup is stable and fully installed to point your VIP DNS record to your actual VIP IP. This will make your installation go much smoother, and allow you a much easier path to troubleshooting if you made a mistake during load balancer configuration.… Read More

vRA 7.2 what’s new?

vRealize Automation 7.2 which was promised at VMworld to enhance ease of use with Out-of-The-Box support for ServiceNow, Azure, and Containers. has just been released today as promised in VMworld. You can download it at: vRealization Automation 7.2 download link. This article highlight few of the major improvements introduced with vRA 7.2.

Azure Endpoint

Microsoft Azure vRA Endpoint

While Amazon AWS, vCloud Air and vCloud Air Network endpoints have been out of the box in vRealize Automation for the longest time, Microsoft Azure has always required custom coding integration to work in vRealize Automation. Many customers showed interest in being able to deploy Microsoft Azure and were waiting patiently for vRA to offer it out of the box. This is coming your way out of the box in vRA 7.2. This will extend vRealize Automation Hybrid Cloud offering reach to Microsoft Azure customers.

The new Azure endpoint will allows customers to:

  • Configure Azure connections (endpoints) per tenant
  • Assign reservations and integrate with their governance model
  • Design blueprints creation with Azure resources, specify network and storage options
  • Supports Azure Networking (subnets, load balancers)
  • Deploy converged blueprints with Azure resources in them
  • vRealize Automation can automatically select the most appropriate subscriptions to deploy to
  • Perform state-aware resource actions on their Azure resources
  • Incorporate key vRA functionality, such as approvals, extensibility, and CBP
  • OTB Day2 lifecycle operations include start, stop, restart, delete

Note: Azure Endpoint is the first to be built on top of extensibility platform (XaaS vs .Net)… Read More

vRealize Automation 7.x F5 Load balancer Configuration

This week I had to work with a customer who used F5 to load balance their vRA Distributed environment, and it has proven that just a small change from recommended configuration can break your full setup. For this reason, I have decided to document the full F5 load balancer configuration on this page. This post can still be helpfull to get you started with other load balancers as well.

As medium distributed install seems to be the most common between customers, I will use it as the base of my post in here, but I will cover the differences in large distributed install as well. Let’s start at first with the list of our setup components. As you will notice in the below table that the manager service and Web are both sharing the same servers unlike large architecture installation where Web and Manager Service are separated into different servers. That has been said, you will still need to setup a different VIP one for Manager Service and one for Web in both medium and large distributed setups. The main difference is that in a medium setup both VIPs will point up to the same servers. You will need as well to setup another VIP for the vRA Appliances.… Read More

vRealize Automation Order of Precedence for Custom Properties.

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.

vRA Custom Properties Order

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

vCloud Air DR to Cloud with vRealize Automation

Traditionally organizations have reserved their Disaster Recovery capabilities to their most critical workload leaving some important workloads without proper disaster recovery due to the high cost of disaster recovery.

Imagine if you went shopping to buy a car with a friend. When you hit the dealership, your friend tell you that you should buy two cars. The first one will be the one you will be using, where the second one is only for you to use if your first car break? Do you find that as an odd advice or at least too costy one? Was not that exactly what you are doing when building your Disaster Recovery Datacenter? You build a full datacenter and fully pay for it and its compute, storage, cooling, space, and operation 24/7.  Luckily, you did not have a disaster this year, but does not that mean you just paid tons of cash for compute, etc that you never used?

What if you can get the same protection, but almost at the cost of only your storage? That’s what DR to Cloud allow you to do. In fact, vCloud Air DR to Cloud offering is great at that, as the cost you are normally paying for storage covers the cost of protecting your VMs in vCloud Air Disaster Recovery.… Read More

Replacing Certificates in vRealize Automation 7

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 Bootstrap Installation

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.

vRA 7 converged blueprint

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
Read More

How to Pass Encrypted Custom Properties to vRealize Automation Guest Agent

Please note passing encrypted custom properties to the Guest Agent in vRA 7.0.1 and higher has been included as an Out of the Box feature. It still use the square brackets as in the below article but it will not require you to modify any files as it was the case with previous versions. You will only need to add the following custom property to your blueprint to activate this:  VirtualMachine.ScriptPath.Decrypt=true. In vRA 7.0.1, for Linux machines you might want to check out the following KB as well: https://ikb.vmware.com/kb/2146540

Have you ever needed to pass an encrypted custom property to your vRealize Automation (previously known as vCloud Automation Center) gugent? I have been asked for this frequently by customers and below are just two of the most common use cases for this.

1- The customer wanted the Gugent to run a script that map a share drive to the deployed VM using the Net Use command where they need a different user credential to login to the map drive.

This is easy to do by letting the Gugent run a command similar to: “net use s: \\tower\movies /user HTG Pa$$word”. The challenge here is who wants to pass his password in clear text or store it in clear text in a script?… Read More

vRealize Automation Modifying Approval E-mails

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

vRealize Automation Gugent stuck and machine deployment timeout

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.”

Request failed machine 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

vRealize Automation deployment to vCloud Air fails

After configuring vRealize Automation Center to be ready to deploy to vCloud Air (End Point, Fabric Group, Reservation, Reservation Policy, Blueprints, etc), my initial vAPP blueprint deployment to vCloud Air has started to fail with the below error message.

“Request failed: Machine VTTest001: an error occurred while customizing the vapp..”

vRA vAPP deployment to vCloud Air fails error occurred while customizing the vAPP

 

Checking the vRA logs under monitoring has given me a bit more descriptive error, which has definitely helped me resolve the issue much more than the original error: “vCloud Customize VM failed for vApp: VTTest001 Error occurred while customizing vAPP. Inner Exception: Auto-logon count must be within 1 to 100 range if enabled or 0 otherwise.”

vAPP deployment fails in vRA autologin error under monitoring log

This has reminded me that I has never setup the auto-logon setting under customization on the VMs building my vAPP template. You will need to check mark the “Automatically log on as Administrator” option as shown in the below screenshot. I would leave the number of automated log on to 1 as well.

vRA deployment to vcloud Air fails Automatically login as an administratorThis has done the trick for me and things worked afterward. I assume others might miss this step as well, and as the initial error might not be obvious indication of the issue, I thought I will try to save you the hassle of trying to figure out how to fix it.… Read More