vRealize Automation

vRealize Automation- Deploying and Configuring Identity Appliance

Manish Jha

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

vRealize Automation- vCAC Introduction

Manish Jha

What is vCloud Automation Center?

vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) is part of vCloud suite (Enterprise Edition) which provides administrators with the ability to provision and configure storage, network and compute resources across multiple platforms.

It makes life of a cloud administrator easier by allowing them to automate application delivery and simplify the deployment of multi-tiered applications while managing multi-vendor and multi-cloud infrastructures.

VMware offers vCloud Automation Center in three editions: Standard, Advanced and Enterprise.

The goal of vCAC is to deploy and provision cloud services across private & public clouds, physical infrastructures, hypervisors and public cloud providers. The following cloud Platforms are supported by vCAC:

1: vCloud Director (as of version 5.1)

2: Hyper-V

3: XenServer

vCAC also supports Dell DRAC, HP ILO, Cisco’s UCS manager and there’s an integration with NetApp DataOntap.

vCAC Architecture                                       

The architecture of vCAC looks like below

vcac arch

Graphic Thanks to VMware

At the very high level, vCAC architecture can be broken down into following tiers:

  • Presentation Tier– The uppermost tier provides an interface to the end-users/consumers who access resources and applications provisioned from the Cloud. 
… Read More