vRA 7.2 Detailed Implementation Guide

Welcome to the vRealize Automation 7.2 Detailed Implementation Guide (DIG). This series of posts — made up of detailed how-to, end-to-end videos, plenty of commentary, and other related content — was put together to help you deploy and configure a highly-available, production-worthy vRealize Automation 7.2 distributed environment, complete with SDDC integration (e.g. VSAN, NSX), extensibility examples and ecosystem integrations. The design assumes VMware NSX will provide the load balancing capabilities and includes details on deploying and configuring NSX from from scratch to deliver these capabilities.

This little project has been in the works for quite some time and will continue to expand as I include additional how-to’s for a variety of use cases (e.g. IPAM and ITSM integration).

Target Audience

This guide was created for anyone looking to install and/or configure vRealize Automation 7.2 in any environment. And, as were my intentions in previous POC guides, the content here can be used as a form of training and education or simply a reference document for existing or new vRA environments.

As for skill level, this guide assumes you have a general idea of vRealize Automation and VMware’s broader Cloud Management products. However there is no expectation that you’ve previously deployed and configured vRA.

Bill of Materials

What you need to be prepared with depends on your own objectives and the extent of which you want to implement vRA. The guide can be used for a basic POC on 2 nodes (1 x vRA VA, 1 x IaaS / Windows VM), or to deploy a highly-available distributed architecture (2 x vRA VA’s, 4 x IaaS VMs). While the guide assumes the latter (distributed), you can easily apply the steps to a minimal POC.

In either case, most of the prerequisites and external dependancies for the core implementation remain the same:

• vCenter / vSphere Web Client
• A healthy vSphere Cluster
• vRA Virtual Appliance (OVA download)
• Windows 2012 R2 VM
• Active Directory
• DNS
• Microsoft SQL Server

Optional (integration covered in detail, but optional to deploy)

• VMware NSX (for load balancing and app-centric networking)
• Virtual SAN

Getting Started

The chapters (sections) are laid in subsequent order and will often refer back to completed configuration tasks from a previous chapter, so I’d recommend completing one section before moving on to the next.

The Introduction gets into much more detail and sets the stage for jumping in. If you prefer an all-video option, the first series of videos have been published in the video guide.

Table of Contents

• vRA 7.2 D.I.G – 01, Introduction
• vRA 7.2 D.I.G – 02, Deploy and Configure NSX | Video
• vRA 7.2 D.I.G – 03, Deploy vRA Virtual Appliances | Video
• vRA 7.2 D.I.G – 04, Prepare IaaS Hosts | Video
• vRA 7.2 D.I.G – 05, Deployment Wizard | Video
• vRA 7.2 D.I.G – 06.1, NSX Load Balancer Configuration | Video
• vRA 7.2 D.I.G – 06.2, Configure DRS
• vRA 7.2 D.I.G – 07, Initial Tenant Configuration | Video
• vRA 7.2 D.I.G – 08, IaaS Fabric Configuration | Video
• vRA 7.2 D.I.G – 09, Creating IaaS Blueprints | Video
• vRA 7.2 D.I.G – 10, Catalog Management | Video
• vRA 7.2 D.I.G – 11, Approval Policies | Video
• vRA 7.2 D.I.G – 12.1, Extensibility Basics | Video
• vRA 7.2 D.I.G – 12.2, Simple Extensibility Use Cases | Video
• vRA 7.2 D.I.G – 13.1, VSAN (SPBM) Integration
• vRA 7.2 D.I.G – 13.2, NSX Integration
• vRA 7.2 D.I.G – 14, vRealize Business

Feedback

I love hearing back from you…it’s what keeps me motivated to build this stuff. Please leave your comments, questions, or other feedback as you work your way through the guide. You can also catch me on twitter.

Also note that while I do in fact represent vRealize Automation as part of my primary responsibilities at VMware, this guide is not intended to replace or supersede any official product documentation, best practice, or guidance provided by VMware.

Let’s get started…ENJOY!

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@virtualjad