While vRealize Automation 8.0 may be the hot new cloud management platform from VMware, vRealize Automation 7.6 still enjoys widespread usage due to its long life and rich feature set. As such, VMware continues to provide bug fixes for vRealize Automation 7.6. Continuing this trend, VMware recently released Hotfix 3 for vRealize Automation 7.6 on February 25, 2020. This cumulative update brings us fixes for 14 separate issues relating to performance, UI, vRealize Operations integration, and adds support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.

If you’re like most large IT environments, a device naming standard is common to maintain order on your network when deploying new devices. Some IT environments utilize simple naming standards, while others are complex and might vary depending on location, device type, device usage, or some other abstract reason. vRealize Automation 8 introduced significant improvements over vRealize Automation 7 when it comes to machine naming including support for naming templates based on:

Over the past several years of operating multiple vRealize Automation 7.x deployments, I’ve come across a situation where the data collection status for the Inventory or State data stays stuck at “In Progress” for a particular vSphere cluster. Usually, this occurs because a vSphere Agent executing the job was stopped mid-process. I initially searched online for a solution and could not find anything that helped. This left me to digging through the vRealize Automation 7.

With the new 64-core AMD EPYC processors available and the 56-core Intel Xeon on the horizon, it was bound to happen… On February 3, 2020, VMware announced that effective April 2, 2020, all per-CPU licensed products will be limited to 32 physical cores per CPU license. This change means that those shiny new 64-core processors will require the purchase of 2 CPU licenses for each processor going forward. This change affects all per-CPU licensed products, including vSphere, vSAN, NSX, and Enterprise PKS, to name a few.

Over the past several years of using vRealize Automation 6.x and 7.x, I have generated numerous dashboards and search queries within Splunk to explore the log data generated by these products. Knowing that vRealize Automation 8.0 is an entirely new product compared to previous versions, I decided that it was time to begin reviewing the log data being generated by the appliance to determine what information could be obtained from the logs.