vRealize

My Top 10 Sessions for VMworld 2017

VMworld-2017

Each year that I’ve gone to VMworld, I always have in mind a certain product path that I want to focus on. With all the great content, there’s just no way that you can attend all of the sessions that you want (thank goodness for on-demand recordings). In 2015, I focused on vSphere and vCenter, as I was taking my VCP6-DCV test during the conference. Last year, all of my sessions were on NSX, since I was taking the VCP6-NV exam during the conference. So following suit, this year, I will be taking the VCP6-CMA exam during the conference. Can you guess what my sessions will be focused on? AUTOMATION…with a dash of NSX! 🙂

So here’s a list of my top 10 sessions that I plan to attend at this year’s conference.

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Upgrade vRealize Operations Manager to 6.6

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Over the past month or so, I’ve been dabbling with vROPs 6. In the midst of my dabbling…VMware released a upgrade to the product that came packed with a bunch of new features. Just to mention some:

Simplified usability and faster time to value capabilities:

  • New HTML5 user interface provides an easier and consistent experience.
  • The Getting Started dashboard allows for quick navigation.
  • Persona based dashboards provides for answers in one place. Dashboards are separated into categories such as Operations, Capacity and Utilization, Performance Troubleshooting, Workload Balance, and Configuration and Compliance.
  • Out of the box integration with vSAN and vRealize Automation provides quick time to value.

Fully Automated Workload Balancing:

  • Ensures performance across the datacenter’s with fully automated workload balancing, across clusters and across data stores.
  • Ensures DRS Configurations and provides the option to set DRS automation level for individual objects.
  • Predictive DRS takes action to preempt resource contention.
  • Utilizes operations analytics to optimize initial placement of workloads through vRealize Automation.

Naturally, after reading about these features…I wanted to try them first hand. So off to my lab I went to upgrade and give it a test drive. The upgrade process is simple, as I will outline in this post.

First, you will want to head over to VMware.com and download the upgrade appliance.

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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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