vRealize Automation

Achievement Unlocked: VCP6-CMA

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Over the past several months, I have really taken a interest in…..THE CLOUD!

With all the talks about automation this and automation that…I figured it was about time for me to jump on board and start learning. More and more these days, businesses are taking advantage of a hybrid cloud model for their data center.

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I’ve always liked to position myself to be valuable and with the rapid speed that NSX and vRealize Automation are going forward with, I needed to stay on top of both products. So taking advantage of the resources in my homelab, I deployed a vRealize Automation environment and integrated NSX with it to begin my studies about the product. Let me start by saying that vRA is MASSIVE. The possibilities really are endless with what you can do with it. One thing I found out soon in my studies was that there really aren’t a lot of good books on vRA 7. The best one that I found also came with the best price….FREE! As a wonderful service to the community, Jen Soldner, Dr. Guido Soeldner, and Dr. Constantin Soeldner created a online copy of the Mastering vRealize Automation 7.1 book that they wrote. This, along with the Eric Shanks’ PluralSight course, got me to a good start at learning the product.

So after months of reading, breaking and fixing the product in my lab, and some late nights studying….I’m proud to say that I passed the VCP6-CMA exam at VMworld US 2017. Now on to the next cert…I’m thinking VCAP6-NV Deploy or AWS. Who knows….maybe both!

Create a Custom Group in vRealize Automation 7

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In our last post we created a reservation to limit the resources that our business group can use for service deployments. But before we get into building services, we want to create a custom group that will allow the tenant administrator to regulate who has permissions to do certain tasks within that tenant. This is really helpful in a enterprise environment when there may be many people with different roles within a organization and not everyone needs access to do everything within vRA.

To begin, log in as the tenant administrator and navigate to Administration > Users & Groups > Custom Groups. Click “New“cg01 Read Full Article

Create a Business Group in vRealize Automation 7

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Create a Fabric Group in vRealize Automation 7

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Now that we have setup our endpoint and a data collection has ran to discover our vCenter resources, its time to start carving those resource up for use…and fabric groups are the starting point. An IaaS administrator can organize compute resources into fabric groups by type and intent. One or more fabric administrators manage the resources in each fabric group. Fabric administrators are responsible for creating reservations on the compute resources in their groups to allocate resources to specific business groups. Fabric groups are created in a specific tenant, but their resources can be made available to users who belong to business groups in all tenants. To begin with creating our fabric group, we need to login as the IaaS administrator and navigate to Infrastructure > Endpoint > Fabric Groups. Click New

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Configuring an Endpoint in vRealize Automation 7

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So far, we’ve created our tenant and we got the tenant setup with Active Directory authentication. The next step we want to take is to create a vSphere endpoint that will allow vRealize Automation to communicate with the vSphere environment and discover compute resources, collect data, and provision machines. To begin, we must first login to our tenant as a IaaS administrator. Once we have done that, we want to navigate to Infrastructure > Credentials to enter in the credentials that the endpoint will use to login in order to see the available resources. Click New.

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Create a Tenant in vRealize Automation 7

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This post will be a short walkthrough on how to create a tenant in vRealize Automation 7. After you complete the initial installation of vRA, you have the default tenant that is created. The default tenant is not where we want to create and deploy any services. The default tenant should be used for creating other tenants and defining other administrators. To begin creating our first tenant we must first log into our default tenant. Navigate to https://FQDN or IP of vRA appliance/ and login with the administrator account that was created during installation

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