vRA 7.x brought a lot of enhancements with it and one of the major enhancement was the simplicity of deploying the setup which was very complex till version 6.x. 

The second major enhancement was to cut the overall footprint of vRA. For VRA 6.x implementation, we needed at least 8 VA’s to form the core services (excluding the IaaS components). This limitation is no more with 7.x implementation.

Now a single pair of VRA VA’s forms the core services. In a distributed install, the load balanced VA’s delivers vRA’s framework services, Identity Manager, Database, vRO, and RabbitMQ. All these services are clustered and sits behind a single load balance VIP and a single SSL cert.

Last year I did a VRA 7.3 simple install in my lab and blogged about it. Did not got chance to play around the distributed install, so this time I decided to complete this unfinished business. In this short series, I will be explaining the steps of doing a distributed install.

For a distributed VRA install, we have 2 deployment models available:

1: vRealize Automation Medium Deployment

2: vRealize Automation Large Deployment

Below diagram taken from VRA 7.4 Reference Architecture Guide shows how a medium deployment architecture looks like.

Before trying your hands on the distributed install, I would highly recommend you to read the following 2 guides:

vRA 7.4 Reference Architecture Guide

vRA Load Balancing Configuration Guide

In a nutshell all requirements for a vRA distributed (medium) deployment is documented here

In next post of this series I will be explaining how my lab setup looks like and it will give you more clarity on what are the prerequisites that needs to be met before attempting the actual installation. Stay tuned !!!

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