Todays announcement of vRealize Automation 8.1 reveals the possibility to use Custom resources in vRA.
I am super exited about that ability. Those who know me, knows that I am a HUGE fan of vRO (vRealize Orchestrator) and the possibility to add anything as a resource in a vRA really opens the product to so many possibilities.
Anything you can imagine, and that you can make vRO do, you can put in a blueprint.
Spoiler alert. New vRA 8.1 feature
When upgrading from vRealize Automation 7.4 to 7.5 or other versions you might get the error:
Applying automatic fix for PowershellScriptExecution prerequisite failed or Pre-install: failed (code p-1)
There can be many reasons for this, but in my case it was a GPO that prohibited PowerShell from executing scripts. as referenced here: VMware
For you it might be something else. Tto figure out what the error was you can start of by looking in the logs, but there is actually much more information available in the original output which gets parsed, and then deleted.
Please be aware that the following is quite technical, and it is not very likely that you can use the fix demonstrated here out of the box, but I might give you a hint or two on how to troubleshoot your own issue.
Continue reading Applying automatic fix for PowershellScriptExecution prerequisite failed
Sometimes I find it easier to create a new vCenter server then migrate the old one, and it is a perfectly good solution in many cases.
But annoyingly there is a lot of manual work involved.
One problem is the VM’s and Templates folders. They do not follow the host, so you have to create the folder structure manually and move each VM into the correct folder. Well I am way to lazy to do that by hand, so it’s time to Automate! Continue reading Migrate folder structure from old to new vSphere vCenter
Today I needed to assign some vCenter tags to some VMs I was deploying using vRealize Automation.
The scenario was that the customer did not want backup of VMs deployed by the vRA test environment, and in production they wanted a specific backup tier.
They are using Veeam backup, so the vRA test environment needed to have a NoBackup Tag, and production needed some other tag, depending on the type of server being deployed.
vRO does not provide very extensive support for these operations out of the box, but vRO 7.2 does come with some sample workflows.
To get started with vCenter tagging you need to configure a vAPI endpoint and a vAPI metamodel.
Continue reading Assigning vCenter tags using vRealize Orchestrator
Tired of having to update all your servers manually, or with Microsoft WSUS, but without control?
Are you tired of wasting 1-2 hours, every time you deploy a template, for it to install all the latest patches?
Why not automate it the easy way?
Today we will look at how to enable REST on phpIPAM. This is an essential part when integrating with vRealize Orchestrator, since REST is an excellent interface for automation.
REST might scare you at first, but don’t loose faith, you will soon enough begin to like it, when you vRealize the power it brings.
Trying to remember the password for all of your different web interfaces?
Remember one less password, by enabling AD (Active Directory) authentication for phpIPAM.
Continue reading Free IPAM solution – 2. Enabling LDAP/AD Authentication
Are you tired of using Excel for managing you IP addresses?
Why not use an IPAM DB to keep track of your VLANs, subnets and IP addresses?
An IPAM solution is a vital building block in an automated environment. Lets go through how you can setup a Free IPAM DB for use with vRealize Orchestrator and vRealize Automation.
