Category Archives: Uncategorized

Approval with Jira change ticket

By | 4. January 2024

Aria Automation has out-of-the-box capabilities for an approval workflow. When implemented, users can approve requests within the Aria Automation interface. In addition, there’s many options to integrate 3rd party tools of different type into a provisioning process. A lot of our customers are asking for integration options into Atlassian Jira. Jira has multiple functionalities from… Read More »

Automated SaltStack Minion Updates through winrepo

By | 9. November 2023

This blog article is a follow-up to the previous article that explains a different way to do minion updates. For Windows minions there’s an even easier method to run the update automatically. This is by using winrepo. Winrepo is a mechanism provided by SaltStack to build a package manager like yum or apt on Linux.… Read More »

Troubleshoot Aria Operations host power metric

By | 4. August 2023

Big thanks to Valentin Bondzio for his support writing this article Aria Operations helps customers to get metrics related to their datacenter sustainability. It captures energy consumption data from vCenter and allows for functionality like customized reporting, break down to workloads, assignment to business units and more. For example, customers can create a report that… Read More »

Self-Service Aria Guardrails Policy in Aria Automation

By | 27. July 2023

VMware Aria Guardrails is a central policy management system with desired state principle and primary focus on public clouds. It consists of several templates that easily can be used by the admin to apply his desired policy on public clouds. One of the templates is for AWS IAM management to define the password policy (like… Read More »

Aria Guardrails – enable elevated access for AWS

By | 21. July 2023

VMware recently introduced a new solution Aria Guardrails which allows for central policy management and desired state configuration in public clouds. With this you e.g. could automatically enforce a password policy in your public cloud accounts without touching every account and monitoring it manually for drifts. The product so far has only been able to… Read More »

Custom Ansible Day-2 action in Aria Automation

By | 15. May 2023

Aria Automation (aka vRealize Automation) has a built-in support for Ansible open-source and Ansible Tower / Ansible Automation Platform. Once a cloud account is defined for Ansible, customers can add Ansible elements to the design canvas and combine them with virtual machine objects. In this case after provisioning a virtual machine, an ansible playbook or… Read More »

Custom Azure Private Endpoint Service for SQL in Aria Automation

By | 15. December 2022

Aria Automation (aka vRealize Automation) provides a wide variety of supported public cloud services out of the box. Through the design canvas they can be added by drag and drop, configured with the appropriate parameters/inputs and subsequently exposed in the catalog for consumption. Considering the broad services public clouds offer and the high innovation rate,… Read More »

Custom categories with ServiceNow Plugin and Aria Automation

By | 29. November 2022

Customers using Aria Automation (aka vRealize Automation) can integrate with external consumption portals like ServiceNow to e.g., use a corporate standard for requesting resources. For ServiceNow specifically, VMware provides a plugin that integrates with Aria Automation and can be downloaded from the ServiceNow store (search for vRealize). After installation, it by default creates categories called… Read More »

Configure roles in Cloud Extensibility Proxy (vRO 8.x)

By | 1. August 2022

Thanks to Daniel Vatov for your help on this blog! vRealize Orchestrator 8.x provides a security model with different roles. As access to vRO is done through vRA roles and authentication, a mapping between roles on vRA side and vRO must take place. While this is described for vRA 8.x here, the same procedure will… Read More »

Manage templates with vSphere content library and vRA 8

By | 11. July 2022

First, I’d like to express my thanks to Jie Shang and Alexander Summerauer who helped in creating the content for this blog. vRealize Automation is architected to manage globally spread infrastructures. Some customers use it to manage their resources in multiple locations within a distinct country by 1 vCenter, some customers have their infrastructures in… Read More »

Manage vCenter, ESX, NSX etc. with SaltStack

By | 28. January 2022

VMware has aquired SaltStack a while ago and incorporated some of the products into the vRealize Automation product family. While most of the configuration management functionality focusses on guest operating systems there has been increasing demand to do the same for VMware SDDC components like vCenter, ESX, NSX etc. as well.  As of this VMware… Read More »

Antrea to NSX-T Integration

By | 20. December 2021

Starting with NSX-T 3.2 its now possible to act as central security control plane for Antrea enabled k8s clusters. This post shows how to set up and gives a short introduction how it works. Prerequisites: have NSX-T 3.2 up and running Prepare 3 Ubuntu 18.04 VMs (4 CPU, 4GB RAM, 25GB Storage), minimum install with… Read More »

Integrate SaltStack Appliance with GIT

By | 11. August 2021

vRealize Automation 8.x includes SaltStack Config as configuration management tool. This works with state files that define which configurations will be applied on target system. One of the options to store state files is leveraging a git repository. In this blog I will explain how the SaltStack appliance can be configured to leverage such a… Read More »

Using vRA Terraform Service in air-gapped environment

By | 20. July 2021

Since vRealize Automation 8.2 the product includes blueprints that can leverage Terraform services. The implementation leverages a Kubernetes cluster where it creates a temporary pod which loads some data from the internet. For some customers it’s mandatory to have no internet connection in the datacenter. Hence a solution is required that can run in a… Read More »

Dynamic Network Selection in request form with vRealize Automation 8 (part 2)

By | 21. May 2021

In one of my previous blogs, I explained how a network selection on blueprint request can be implemented: https://www.vrealize.it/2020/06/25/vrealize-automation-network-selection-in-request-form/ As always there’s multiple ways to achieve goals. The above-mentioned blog is using custom properties to realize the network selection. This has the general advantage that the process could be used for other selections as well… Read More »

Installing Antrea Container Networking and AVI Kubernets Operator (AKO) for Ingress

By | 22. January 2021

Update: January 2021 update with current versions (Antrea v0.12.0 AKO 1.13 / Controller 20.1.3) This post shows how to integrate Antrea Container Networking with NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB) using AVI Kubernetes Operator (AKO) This example shows integration of a single K8S cluster with NSX ALB. If you plan to integrate more than one… Read More »

vSphere with Tanzu with NSX-T medium sized edge

By | 8. January 2021

vSphere with Tanzu automatically deploys an NSX-T based load balancer for its supervisor cluster control plane. The load balancer size is defined as MEDIUM and requires an EDGE node of large size which is defined with 8 vCPU and 32GB RAM. While the creation of a supervisor cluster does also work with a medium sized… Read More »

Self-Service user onboarding in vRealize Automation

By | 17. December 2020

vRealize Automation 8/Cloud provides a comprehensive platform to offer service as part of a catalog experience. Users that have been assigned to projects and catalog items can select from the services available and request those accordingly. If new users want to get access to the platform typically an admin user must grant them permissions to… Read More »

Using OpenVPN to connect on-premises Datacenter to AWS VPC

By | 9. December 2020

For a customer demo I needed a quick way to interconnect my on-premises environment with a AWS VPC without getting a AWS direct connect or the possibility to open the on-premises firewall for a NSX IPSEC tunnel. So I made it work with OpenVPN which just needs TCP Port 443 to be allowed on the… Read More »

Integration of vRealize Automation with Keycloak authentication

By | 13. November 2020

Beforehand I would like to express my thanks to Sascha Warno for his help in configuring the Keycloak integration. vRealize Automation 8 is leveraging VMware Identity Manager for authentication of users. While in most environments Identity Manager is integrated with LDAP directory services like Microsoft Active Directory, it supports a wide variety of other identity… Read More »