Earlier this month I hosted “vRA 6.2 Install and Config Live!“, an open-invite social event dubbed “vRA Live” (#vralive). To my surprise, I had 185 RSVP’s with more than 100 people — VMware partners, customers, and several of my peers — attending the 4 1/2+ hour online session. Although I tried to focus on the fundamentals of deploying vRA and associated services, the online Q&A and dialog provided by the experts panel added several examples, lesson’s learned, and plenty of colorful commentary. I couldn’t be more pleased with the turnout and hope to get the next session(s) queued up very soon!

Speaking of the experts panel, I’d like to thank them for all they’ve done to help! These rockstars provided a ton of commentary and responded to more than 150 questions posted by attendees (the Q&A is being trimmed up and will be posted soon)…

(…follow these people if you don’t already!!)

During the event I walked through — from scratch and in plenty of detail — deploying and configuring VMware vRealize Automation (vRA) 6.2. Besides being a how-to enablement session, I also tried to demonstrate how straight-forward the solution really is once you take a step back and understand exactly what you want to deliver to the consumers of the various services. With that said, this was a non-distributed environment which understandably avoided the environmental complexities, caveats, and special considerations of a distributed install. I’m am working with some of my peers within VMware to host a similar session that focuses on a distributed implementation. Stay tuned for that.

The entire WebEx session was recorded and is available for download or playback here. WebEx recordings are typically low quality and clunky so I also recorded a high(er)-quality screen capture, which has been split, edited, and published for your viewing pleasure.

The videos below split the 4 1/2 hours of content into focused subtopics, generally following the event agenda. A couple of notes on these…due to the live nature of which they originated, editing them into individual, self-contained topics was tricky. For example, there are no intros as each video starts…they start where the previous one ended and jump right into the topic. My OCD tendencies had me try to blend or otherwise manipulate each start, but I eventually gave in and let it be. Also, pardon the screaming…the MBP mics are quite sensitive.

Anyway, enjoy!…

Part 1 – Opening and Experts Panel Introductions


 Part 2 – Deploying vRA 6.2’s Virtual Appliances


 Part 3 – Deploying vRA 6.2, Installing IaaS Services


 Part 4 – Deploying vRA 6.2, Initial System Configuration


 Part 5 – vRA 6.2 Tenant Configuration, Adding a Tenant


 Part 6 – vRA 6.2 Tenant Configuration, Adding Endpoints


 Part 7 – vRA 6.2 Tenant Configuration, Fabric Groups and Business Groups


 Part 8 – vRA 6.2 Tenant Configuration, Creating a Reservation (VDC)


 Part 9 – vRA 6.2 Tenant Configuration, Create and Publish IaaS Blueprints


 Part 10 – vRA 6.2 Tenant Configuration, Entitle and Provision IaaS Blueprints


 Part 11 – vRA XaaS Config – Creating XaaS (ASD) Services

Thanks again to all the participants. This post wraps things up for 2014 and queues up many additional sessions and great topics for 2015!

Happy New Year!

+++++
@virtualjad

Categories: Automation, Cloud, Install Guide, Management, VMware, vRA24 Comments

24 Comments

  1. Thanks for sharing very useful video. Can you please share the details where i can get training or hands on experience online.

    If there is any way to learn or get hands on experience then please share on my mail id- [email protected]

  2. Hello!
    Could you help?
    I deploy test configuration of vRealize Automation
    I have vCenter server installed on Windows VM.
    When i add vcenter as endpoint i cant see resources.
    SDK address and credentials is ok.
    What can i do? How to add resources?

  4. Do you know how to customize the portlets you can add to the Home tab on the dashboard? I have access to the server where the application is hosted but I’m not sure where the portlet code is stored.

  5. Pingback: vRealize Automation 7 – Part 3, The Deployment Wizard | [virtualjad.com]
  7. Pingback: vRA Live! – Extensibility Videos Published | [virtualjad.com]

  8. Hi Jad,
    Thanks you posted vRealize Automation install and config, I have install your step but error when config Infratructure Tab “Service Unreachable, The system cannot reach a required service at the expected address.
    Contact your system administrator for assistance.Reference error REPO404.”
    After install IaaS Server, I watch log, see error “Could not find certificate for VMware Management Agent 26a304ba-33c1-44d5-a68f-b88be6802356. There must be one certificate with CN = VMware Management Agent 26a304ba-33c1-44d5-a68f-b88be6802356 in the personal store of the local computer.”
    Please help me!
    Thanks.

  9. This is fantastic work!! It gave me in-depth understanding of the entire vRealize Automation solution.

  10. Hi Jad

    A little FYI:

    Need to licensed for Advanced or Enterprise edition in order to get Advanced Services.

    Standard Edition (Bundled in vCloud Suite Standard) does not allow Advanced Services.

    Thanks
    Darren

  11. Thanks for the videos Jad – I have been through them a couple of times already whilst performing fresh install of vRA 6.2.2. Both vRA and vRAID appliances are fresh, and IaaS server is Win2012R2

    Unfortunately am having some trouble with adding Identity Store for my first custom Tenant. I receive “System Exception” error when trying to Update the Identity Source info. Test connection is fine. I have the cirrect ldap URL, I have the correct user name DN. Not sure what is going on.

    Am not sure which log file and in what location to check.

    vCenter Server 6.0 (Windows install with embedded PSC; upgraded from 5.5)
    vRA 6.2.2
    ESXi 6.0

    Any help would be appreciated

    thx
    Darren

  12. Again – great post. For those interested in how to customize the SSL certs so they are actually trusted in your environment, I stumbled upon a great post that is broken into 3 parts beginning with actually building out a windows root CA all the way through to using openssl to generate the CSR and issue the cert and import it into the appliance. I am not working with load balanced appliances, just the config in this post – but definitely good for getting a leg up if you are new at the SSL process in general.

    It is also noteworthy that this is a current post as it covers the vra 6.2 environment: http://www.virtualizationteam.com/cloud/generating-certificates-for-the-identity-appliancevcac-appliance.html

  13. Pingback: A Quick Lesson on vRA Entitlements | [virtualjad.com]

  14. Hi Jad please I am having SSL/TLS error during during the deployment of iaas. How do i go around this without having to buy a certificate because am just working on a test lab.

  15. Hi Hussain,

    I just ran into the same issue. The source of my problem was actually the browser, in particular, the compatibility settings in IE. I'm not a fan of it at all but used Chrome with no issues. Once the compatibility settings were update in IE, everything works as expected.

  16. Hi Jad,

    Thanks for the great videos on vRA,

    I have followed your instructions step by step to build my home-lab but I stuck at "New Reservation" for vSphere (vCenter) – at Part 8 of the series. As when I go to "Resources" tab I cannot see any resources (no memory nor storage), I tried different account for endpoint (vcenter) as well for the Fabric Group, still no positive outcome.

    So far there is also no solution online (as some others having same issue), any help is appreciated.

    Kind regards,
    Hussain

    • Hi Hussain,

      I expect you have it sorted by now but if not, check out the logs under Infrastructure – Monitoring – Logs. If you see something like:

      "DataBaseStatsService: ignoring exception: Error executing query usp_SelectAgent Inner Exception: Error executing query usp_SelectAgentCapabilities"

      repeatedly, then check out this blog post from StorageGumbo: http://www.storagegumbo.com/2014/09/using-cloned-vm-as-sql-server-gotcha.html – it solved the same problem for me.

      Thanks for a great resource in these videos Jad!

    • Exactly I had the same issue but after following the below steps I was able to resolve it
      Then reconfigure the security settings for MSDTC as outlined below.
      1.Click Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Component Services.
      2.Expand the Component Services menu item on the left hand side until you can see “Local DTC”.
      3.Right click on Local DTC and select Properties.
      4.Select the Security tab.
      5.Click the selection boxes for Network DTC Access, Allow Remote Clients, Allow Remote Administration, Allow InBound, and Allow OutBound.
      6.Click OK.
      7.Restart the MSDTC services. (in some cases you may need to restart the VM)

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