Endpoints are infrastructure sources that are consumed by vCloud Automation Center.

vRealize Automation supports following endpoints:

• vCenter
• vCloud Director
• Hyper-v, Citrix Xen server,
• Physical servers like HP,DELL and Cisco
• cloud platforms like Openstack, Amazon Web Services (AWS) etc.

Physical Endpoints

A physical endpoint represents one physical machine or a pool of multiple physical machines. To make a physical machine available for provisioning, you must create an endpoint to represent it. Information about each known physical machine, such as its installed memory and CPU count, is collected regularly through its management interface.

vRealize Automation communicates with physical machines through the following types of physical endpoints, which represent the management interfaces through which it communicates.

• Cisco UCS Manager
• Dell iDRAC
• HP iLO

Note: iDRAC and iLO endpoints represent single standalone machines. Cisco UCS Manager endpoints represent pools of multiple machines.

vRealize Automation make use of DEMs or agents to communicate with and manage endpoints.… Read More

vRealize Automation can be used to create private cloud or hybrid cloud that can be shared by a number of groups within a company.

vRealize Automation has a concept called Tenants that can be used to provide isolation between independent groups in shared cloud environment, where multiple companies, divisions or independent groups are using a common infrastructure fabric, Tenants are useful for isolating the users, resources and services from one tenant from those of other tenants.

A tenant can be compared to an organizational unit. For private clouds a tenant can be a business unit within enterprise. In hybrid clouds it can be a company that subscribes to cloud services from a service provider.

In Multi-Tenant environment each tenant has unique configuration policies that are specific to that tenant.  Let’s look as some of the attributes that define a tenant.

• Each tenant has one or more identity stores that are used to authenticate users. 

In our last post Installing and Configuring vRA appliance we learned what is vRealize automation appliance and how to deploy and configure it. In this post we will learn installing and configuring the 3rd component of vRA suite “IaaS”. As always before jumping into install/configure lets have a look on what is IaaS and what it offers.

Overview of IaaS

IaaS stands for Infrastructure as a Service and provides a self-service portals to administrators and end users with ability to provisioning or deploy virtual machines on virtual and physical servers and across private, public and hybrid cloud infrastructures.

vRA IaaS is made up of several components including:

• IaaS Website
• Distributed Execution Managers(DEM)
• Agents
• Model Manager
• Manager Service
• Database

If you want to learn about functionality of these components please read the earlier post vCAC Introduction of this series.

The following diagram shows the relation of the different components of vRA:

Installation Pre-requisites:

• Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 / Windows Server 2012 R2
• Microsoft .NET

In our last post we have installed and configured Identity Appliance which will serve as SSO for rest of the components of vCAC (vRA). In this post we will learn how to install and configure vRealize Automation Appliance (formerly vCAC).

Before diving into installation lets have a basic understanding of what is vRA and what it do.

Overview of vRA

The vRA appliance provides cloud management & a self-service portal for cloud services  as well as authoring, administration, and governance.  vRA can be deployed as a single instance or we can deploy multiple instances of it behind a load balancer to achieve high availability.

Installation Prerequisites

1: DNS (forward / reverse) entry created for vRA appliance.

2: Network Time Protocol (NTP) server configured.

3: SSO (Identity Appliance or vCenter 5.5 U1 SSO) installed and configured.

4: 2 vCPU / 8 GB of RAM / 30 GB of storage.

Database Consideration

The vRA appliance have an embedded Postgres database but we have also following choice for database selection:

a: Use the embedded vPostgres database available with  vRA appliance.… Read More

Setting up vCAC (vRA) environment consists of 3 things:

1: Deploying and Configuring Identity Appliance

2: Deploying and configuring vRA Appliance (vCAC Server)

3: Deploying and Configuring IaaS Components

If you have missed earlier posts of this series then I would recommend reading them first before going ahead. You can access the earlier posts from below links:

1: Introduction to vCAC(vRA)

In this post we will be focusing on Installing and Configuring the Identity Appliance

What is Identity Appliance?

The VMware Identity Appliance is a virtual appliance for vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) that provides vCAC with single sign-on (SSO) authentication capabilities.

The Identity Appliance is available in form of ovf template which can be deployed on top of vSphere. Depending upon the infrastructure design, you can deploy a single instance of Identity Appliance or can go ahead with multiple instances (For HA purposes).

Note: Identity Appliance is not a mandatory requirement if you are running vSphere v5.5 Update 1 or above in your environment.… Read More