Cumulative Update for vRealize Automation 7.6

21/07/2019 by user

UPDATE: Since I wrote this post, VMware have taken down this update because it causes issues with multi-tab XAAS forms. Specifically, it appears that each tab of a XAAS form will submit a request. One of these requests is “real” and will process properly, while the others will error out. As of 24th October, the hotfix is still offline. The issue with Chrome not rendering buttons was resolved in Chrome 76.

Earlier this month, VMware released the first Cumulative Update for vRealize Automation 7.6. The knowledge base article for it is available at https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/70911 The patch file is about 1.1GB.

The first resolved issue in the article is most likely the one that people are experiencing and the easiest to see – “Deployment forms are missing the Submit, Next and Cancel buttons” when viewed in Chrome 75. Below is a comparison of how the form is rendered in Chrome 75 versus Microsoft Edge.


Chrome 75 rendering	Microsoft Edge Rendering

This issue by itself is a big showstopper if an organisation uses this functionality. I suspect this update will be a “must have” for them.

VMware vRealize Automation 7.6 – What’s New

26/04/2019 by user

VMware released an update for vRealize Automation (vRA) at the start of this month. This was a slight increment from 7.5 to 7.6. At a high level, two key areas of change are NSX integration and the vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) user experience. The Release Notes goes into a bit more detail and I’ll be using those more detailed items as a guide for the content in this post. I will be skipping over the new NSX pieces as I don’t have those available to me.

vRealize Automation – Dealing with a disconnected/orphaned IAAS Server

17/04/2019 by user

Following the installation of a replacement UPS I made a horrible discovery – there was problems with my vRealize Automation setup. The first sign of what was to come was when I reviewed the console of the vRealize Automation (vRA) Virtual Applications.

Anyone who has had to setup vRealize Automation would probably know the sinking feeling I started feeling. Having to setup vRA again from scratch was not something I really wanted to do….

Creating Service Accounts with vRealize Orchestrator

11/12/2018 by user

vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) has a lot of plugins that allow it to integrate with other systems and services. One of such plugin is for Active Directory. This plugin allows you to perform a number of standard AD activities, like creating users. vRO already has built in workflows to create and manipulate users. In this post, I’m going to run through what you might end up implementing if you wanted to be able to create Service Accounts via vRO.

Improving the vRA Admin Experience – Reservation Alerts to Slack

28/09/2018 by user

The Reservation system in vRealize Automation (vRA) provides a bucket of resources to a team or business unit via Business Group. A risk with Reservations comes about with how I think VMware intended them to be used vs how some organisations may use them. I suspect VMware’s intention was that Reservations should be self-managed by the Business Group associated with it. This makes sense if each individual team has a Business Group as the scope of what’s in the Reservation is “their stuff”. It would mean if a Reservation reached capacity, it would be up to that team to manage the situation.

What if the Business Group was being used differently, where it covers multiple teams? In the event of the Reservation becoming full, the scope is larger than one team. In this situation, it might be good to get a heads up on when Reservations are running low on resources. Email alerts can be setup and yes, sent through to Slack, the formatting in Slack is less than desirable. So I decided to look at a way of doing it better.

Improving the vRA Customer Experience – Send Chef errors to Slack

19/09/2018 by user

One of the issues that can be amplified by automation is logging. Some logs have an ephemeral nature, having a short lifespan due to various factors. This can be especially painful if the logs relate to failures and contain information that could assist in fixing the problem.

This was the issue I was seeing when vRealize Automation (vRA) requests would fail when Chef attempted to apply settings. If Chef failed critically, vRA would be made aware of it and fail the entire request. Of course, vRA would then delete the virtual machine and the local Chef logs. In many cases, there was a gap of only a minute or two between the Chef failure and the vRA cleanup tasks.

VMware vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 1.2 – First Impressions

19/06/2018 by user

When VMware created the vRealize brand, they grouped together some of their most complex products under one banner. vRealize Automation (vRA) required the deployment and configuration of two components – a virtual appliance and a Windows server. The Windows server had a long list of prerequisites. In terms of operational management, using products like vRA meant ongoing work on scripts, workflows and other artifacts. The logical response to this is to create a non-production instance to protect your production instance. Moving updates to production could be achieved manually or via VMware’s Codestream product, but both approaches left a lot to be desired. vRealize Suite Life Cycle Manager (vRSLCM or just LCM) is a new approach to this set of problems.

Getting LCM Running

LCM comes supplied as a “Virtual Application” where a few configuration options are required to provision it. One of the LCM-specific settings is whether you want to enable the vaguely named “Content Management”. Enabling this will cause the appliance to use 4 processors instead of 2. Once the appliance is deployed and started, the rest of the configuration happens via the web interface.

SQL As A Service Proof of Concept with SQL 2012 and vRealize Automation

05/03/2016 by user

Standing up a redundant/highly available database infrastructure can be one of the more complicated pieces of work. Doing it by hand is a long process with any points where errors could happen. It was with this in mind that I decided to use this as my first “project” with vRealize Automation.

A Brief History of SQL Server High Availability

When discussing redundancy or high availability (HA) for databases, there’s two distinct outcomes – firstly to ensure the continued delivery of the service in the event of infrastructure failure (the actual HA part) and secondly to ensure the data is kept in an orderly fashion (data integrity, no loss of data, etc). Where these two activities happen depend on the technology used.

In older versions of SQL Server, these outcomes were achieved using SQL Clustering. In SQL Clustering, the HA function was achieved at the server level by having 2 or more servers, while data integrity was maintained by the database residing on shared storage.