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
Back in the day it was customary to divide your VMs into three “blue” folders. I was not uncommon to see the three folders named High Priority, Normal Priority and Low Priority, and then people would distribute the VMs into those folders. The reason they were called blue folder was because it was really resource pools created in a DRS cluster in the Hosts and Clusters view in vCenter. And they were not made to logically divide you VMs into “folders”.
Spoiler Alert
New DRS Feature – Scalable SHares
The problem with this approach is that unless you regularly reconfigured these resource pools you would get unexpected performance. I was not uncommon for an installation to have 5-10% of the VMs in the high priority “folder”, 80% in the normal priority “folder” and 5-10% in the low priority “folder”. The problem with this is that if you then select High, Normal and Low shares for these folders, you will not get the performance you would expect.
Continue reading vSphere 7 – Return of the blue folders