One of the first goal for 2018 is to pass my VCP7-CMA exam and thus I decided to set up a home lab on latest version of vRealize Automation i.e 7.3 and this post is all about my lab setup.

1: In my lab I am using vSphere 6.0 U3 and I have deployed 4 hosts and each host have 4 vCPU and 32 GB RAM.

2: Deployed vCSA 6.0 U3 (vCenter with Embedded PSC)

3: Purely using vDS (v6.0) in my lab and I have created port groups for separation of traffic. Each Esxi host have 4 NIC’s :

• vmnic0 for Management network : 192.168.109.X/24 
• vmnic1 for vMotion network: : 192.168.108.X/24
• vmnic2 and vmnic3 for iSCSI storage connectivity: 192.168.106.X/24

4: Deployed openfiler and created 2 volumes. Both mapped to single target and servicing all 4 Esxi host that are in mgmt cluster. Thus each esxi host is mounting 2 luns from openfiler appliance. 

4: A windows server 2012 box which have AD + DNS + NTP configured. Each component deployed in lab will be syncing its time from my AD server.

• service accounts created in advance. Alexsvcvra will be used throughtout this lab.

• A records/PTR records created in advance

5: A Server 2012 box configured with CA role. This will be used in replacing self signed certs on deployed components. 

6: NSX Manager and vRA OVA’s downloaded from myvmware.com. Both can be downloaded from here

7: Server 2012 box deployed for hosting vRA IaaS components. This box has following configured.

• This server is fully patched and joined to domain “alex.local”.
• Service account Alexsvcvra has been added to administrator group.
• Firewall has been disabled. 
• Jre 1.8 installed on this box and variable JAVA_HOME defined. 

8: Server 2012 box deployed and SQL server 2014 installed. This box will server as DB server for IaaS host. Instructions for installing DB will be covered in next post of this series.

9: Licenses has been added/applied for NSX, Esxi hosts and vCenter server.

Below screenshots pretty much sums up what I wrote so far

Apart from these I can’t remember what else I have configured in lab. If I am missing any configuration stuff, Ii will add them later.

And that’s it for this post. I hope you find this post informational. Feel free to share this on social media if it is worth sharing. Be sociable 🙂