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

VMware vRealize Automation 6.2 and the missing vCO

If you have tried to upgrade your current vCloud Automation Center distributed install to vRealize Automation 6.2 or if you have tried to plan for the upgrade lately, you will notice one piece of the puzzle seems to be missing. At the time vRealize Automation 6.2 was released, vRealize Orchestrator 6.0 was not released yet as it suppose to be a part of the vSphere 6.0 release(not yet released).

While the vRealize Automation 6.2 appliance has came up with a builtin vCO 6.2 with the 6.2 plugin installed which was sufficient for small deployment that did not require a distributed install, customers with distributed install are wondering what to do. In this article I wanted to highlight the three options available to you and when to approach each of these routes.

1- vRealize Orchestrator(vRO) 6.0 has been made available to vRealize Automation 6.2 customers before vSphere 6.0 go GA, where you will have to open a support ticket to obtain it. Here is the KB article documenting that: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2100951

2- Convert a vRA 6.2 appliance into vRO 6.2 appliance, again here is the KB documenting this: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2100951     (Almost there is no more use case for this with vRO 6.0 available to you through GSS.… Read More

VMware vRealize Automation 6.2 is now available for download

vRealize Automation 6.2, which is the new name for vCloud Automation Center has been made available for download earlier today. This release will be adding a lot of new enhancement & features where you can find the full list in the vRealize Automation 6.2 Release notes. In here I want to cover few main enhancements, that I was patiently waiting for.

1- Ability to edit custom properties for published applications in the service catalog. While this enhancement is sneaked in very late down in the release note & many have not given it as much attention, it is one of the greatest enhancement in my opinion in this release. If you have worked with vCAC in the past and tried to integrate it with VMware Application Director (just renamed to vRealize Automation Application Services), you were always faced with the challenge that if you publish applications using application director into vCAC, you will not be able to pass custom properties to the underlying VMs blueprint, which was a big challenge. Actually in many cases, it eliminated the ability to use application director without a very heavy customization. Now this constrain being lifted, I can see the amount of great power vRealize Automation will enjoy when coupled with vRealize Automation Application Services.… Read More

vCAC 6 Custom Properties – Build Profiles – Property Dictionary

vCloud Automation Center offer a lot of extensibility features built in within the product that help you achieve your desired result while minimizing the amount of coding required. vCAC Custom Properties, Build Profiles, Property Dictionary is just an example of how you can customize the product to meet your needs while minimizing coding as well customize the input form to meet your need. As Property Dictionary seems to be the most missed/mis-understood feature of vCAC followed by Build Profiles and Custom Properties, I have decided to put a post together trying to simplify the explanation of these great features as much as possible. As well, I will be pointing you out to more resources at the end of the article to learn more in depth of each of these features.

vCAC Custom Properties:

As Custom Properties is the building block for Build Profiles and Property Dictionary, it will be very hard to explain any of the later without covering Custom Properties. As per VMware documentation, the way they define custom properties is as follow:

“VMware vCloud Automation Center™ custom properties allow you to add attributes of the machines your site provisions, or to override their standard attributes.”

What that is trying to say, vCloud Automation Center utilize particular variables (Custom Properties) that contain values that vCAC uses during machine provisioning (Ex: machine name, machine IP Address, Port Group to use, & so on).… Read More

vCenter Orchestrator has no vCenter Server 5.0 plug-in tab

After coming back to a VMware vCenter Orchestrator 4.2 in my home lab that i have installed a while back, I have noticed that the vCenter Orchestrator Configuration interface was not showing the vCenter Server 5.0 plug-in tab. Actually it was showing the vCenter 4.1 plugin tab. As soon I saw that I remembered that the Plug-in for VMware vCenter Server 5 is not included in the VMware vCenter Orchestrator 4.2 included in the vSphere 5 vCenter installer CD. Then I thought what if I did not know that and I got to this stage. How odd & how long would I waste to figure out what is wrong with my setup.

To make it more interesting going to the vSphere vCenter 4.1 plugin tab in VMware vCO  and configure it with vCenter 5 information pass the validation without any error or complain. The only time you will start noticing the result of using the wrong plugin is when you start trying to execute any VMware vCenter Orchestrator workflow that require information to be populated from VMware vCenter. At that time you will notice that nothing show up in your vCenter inventory & you start scratching your head. Below is a screen shot to demonstrate how the vCenter 4.1… Read More