Tag Archives: vRA

Real World Clouds with vRealize Automation 7 – Getting Started

Welcome to what we hope is a long journey in Real World Clouds. Over the past 6 years, we’ve both personally seen much change in this space but one thing that we felt was definitely missing in the blogosphere, were answers to real customer questions. In this series, we’re hoping to showcase some of the complex integrations and advanced services that can be built using the vRealize Suite. Our goal is to get you setup with blueprints and then discuss all the nitty gritty details around service design. With that said, let’s get started.

deployacloud

Getting Started

First of all, this is not a beginners series. You will absolutely need to have vRealize Automation 7 setup and configured. We also assume you already know what Business Groups, Reservations, Entitlements, etc. are. Some of these items will be recapped as needed, but if you want a great getting started guide on vRealize Automation 7 there are several great resources at the www.theithollow.com by Eric Shanks and http://www.virtualjad.com by Jad El-Zein.

The following items are assumed to be in place and working:

  • vRealize Automation 7 Installed and Configured – Simple or Distributed is fine
  • vRealize Orchestrator Installed and Configured
    • vSphere Plugin Configured
    • vRealize Automation Plugin Configured
    • Active Directory Plugin Configured
  • Tenant Configuration Complete with EndPoints for vSphere and vRO configured
  • 1 x Fabric Group created
  • 1 x Business Group created
  • 1 x Reservation created

Programming Skills

Am I going to need to program? The short answer is, absolutely yes. We get asked this a lot and we definitely plan on writing some posts on this soon, but for now, let’s assume you have a basic knowledge in the following areas:

  • Javascript
    • Basic Understanding of variable passing
    • If/Else
    • Switch
    • While Loops
    • For Loops

Also be sure to check out W3 Schools http://www.w3schools.com/js/default.asp which is a great reference website. I almost always search in google things like “w3schools javascript while loop” to find what I need quickly. 

For a great primer on Javascript, I still to this day recommend the book Eloquent Javascript. It’s also a great book just to have at hand while programming workflows.

 

Last, but certainly not least, are other great vRO/vRA Websites like vCO Team, and many others.

vRealize Orchestrator

vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) is going to be the basis for a number of the subsequent posts. Don’t worry if you aren’t 100% versed in vRO just yet. We will walk you through all of the workflows in detail and I’m also in parallel working to publish a pluralsight class (https://www.pluralsight.com/)  on developing workflows with vRO.

Infrastructure

We will be focusing primarily on VMware vSphere 6 in this series. It is assumed you already have a base understanding of vSphere and vCenter.

Other Useful VMware Reference Sites:

VMware Documentation – http://pubs.vmware.com/vra-70/index.jsp

vRealize Automation SDK 7.0 – https://developercenter.vmware.com/web/sdk/7.0.0/vrealize-automation

VMware vRealize Automation Cloud Client – https://developercenter.vmware.com/tool/cloudclient/4.0.0