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vRealize Automation

Updating to vRealize Automation 7.6 Hotfix 7

I had been burned by updating vRealize Automation a little too quickly following a hotfix release. Chrome 75 caused some rendering issues in the deployment forms. These issues were resolved by Hotfix 1, which introduced some extra issues. The most visible one is the duplicate requests on an XAAS (Anything as a Service) blueprint. An example of this behaviour is shown below

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The second issue that I’ve seen as cosmetic. It was resolved in Hotfix 2. In this issue, labels on an XAAS blueprint rendered correctly in the Designer but when requesting the blueprint via the catalog, the label text would wrap. An example of this is in the image below:

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vRealize Automation 8.0.1 Update Walkthrough

VMware have released a minor update for vRealize Automation (vRA) 8. This is my experience of attemtping to update the instance running in my home lab.

Update Preparation

In the Release Notes for 8.0.1 there’s a section for performing an upgrade. A couple of items in this section jump out. Firstly, that the vRA product supports upgrading from vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (LCM), with a link on the process. The second is an explicit mention of disk space requirements. Based on this, the first thing I checked was the free space for the two partitions mentioned.

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VMUG vRealize Suite 2019 and vRA 8

VMUG recent added the vRealize Suite 2019 to their EVALExperience offering. For those not familiar with it, EVALExperience is part of the paid “Advantage” member in VMUG. This paid membership includes discounts on training and other benefits. This is on top of benefits of free membership.

This new addition means it’s now possible to get a 365-day license for all the components of the vRealize Suite 2019, including vRealize Automation 8. The license is for personal use in a home lab. I had previously tried updating the license on my vRA 8 installation from an Advanced to an Enterprise one, using Lifecycle Manager. It didn’t like that.

vRA 8 – GetDiskInfo: ERROR: Partition name buffer too small

After spending a lot of time looking at the web interface for vRealize Automation 8 (vRA 8), I decided to look under the hook a bit. One of the first things I looked at was the logs. It seems one of the primary logs that vRA 8 uses is /var/log/vmware-vmsvc.log Upon viewing this log, I was greeted with the following spam: 

[2019-12-05T11:47:54.126Z] [ warning] [guestinfo] GetDiskInfo: ERROR: Partition name buffer too small
[2019-12-05T11:47:54.126Z] [ warning] [guestinfo] Failed to get disk info.
[2019-12-05T11:48:24.128Z] [ warning] [guestinfo] GetDiskInfo: ERROR: Partition name buffer too small
[2019-12-05T11:48:24.128Z] [ warning] [guestinfo] Failed to get disk info.
[2019-12-05T11:48:54.127Z] [ warning] [guestinfo] GetDiskInfo: ERROR: Partition name buffer too small
[2019-12-05T11:48:54.128Z] [ warning] [guestinfo] Failed to get disk info.

As shown by the timestamps, this error will repeat every 30 seconds, resulting in this log being totally flooded with this error. I also confirmed this error was happening in another instance than my own. Upon googling the message, I found a Github issue entry that referenced this and how it can be caused by the very long paths with Kubernetes. vRA 8 uses Kubernetes heavily. The code fix that resolved this issue appears to have been folded into the v11.0.1 release of the open-vm-tools. When checking the version on the vRA 8 appliance, we can see the following:

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When checking the package info via yum, the versions available range from 10.2.0 to 10.3.10 from the repositories that vRA is configured to use. So it appears updating isn’t an option at this time.

vRealize Automation 8 First Impressions – Installation

vRealize Automation 7 has been travelling along for a while now. While it’s now at a level of maturity, it’s always been a complicated application, even just in terms of infrastructure (with the need for Windows-based “IAAS” servers). vRealize Automation 8 would appear to represent a tipping point for a lot of things VMware has been working on in the background across multiple products and technologies.

The deployment architecture in vRA 8 represents a significant shift from prior versions. The installer deploys three virtual machines. These VMs will consume a total resource set of 12 vCPU, 44GB of RAM and about 246GB of disk space.

vRealize Automation 8 First Impressions – Lifecycle Manager

vRealize Lifecycle Manager (LCM) is the first component installed by vRA 8’s unified “Easy Installer”. One of its primary functions is the deployment of VMware’s vRealize products. As mentioned in my Installation post, a link to the LCM UI appears towards the end of the installation process. The Dashboard of LCM has five items: Lifecycle Operations, Locker, User Management, Content Management and Marketplace

Managing Local Admins via vRealize Automation

One of the major benefits of vRealize Automation (vRA) is the ability to add and extend the “Actions” available. These Actions enable self-service by the customer. One scenario I wanted to try was allowing someone to manage local administrators on a virtual machine they had provisioned.

Creating The Workflow

The starting point with this is creating a Workflow in vRealize Orchestrator (vRO). Managing local administrators would mean being able to add and remove members, so if I wanted it as a single workflow, there would be some sort of branching logic, such as the flowchart below: Image