Orchestration

As a followup to my Deploying VMware vRealize Automation 8.0 walkthrough, we’ll now utilize our new vRealize Automation 8.0 deployment to configure a basic Blueprint and provision our first virtual machine using Cloud Assembly. vRealize Automation 8.0 includes a great “Getting Started” wizard that we’re provided when we access our deployment for the first time. While this option gets us up and running the fastest with Cloud Assembly, it obscures the task required to begin using Cloud Assembly.

vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.0 is the latest release of VMware’s application platform for deploying, upgrading, and managing the various products included in the vRealize Suite. Don’t worry; you didn’t miss several releases between version 2.1 to version 8.0. Instead, VMware has decided to baseline all of the latest vRealize Suite products onto a common version number. Unlike with the previous version of Lifecycle Manager, upgrading to version 8.0 requires the deployment of a new virtual appliance and migration of your existing configuration.

The latest release of vRealize Automation 8.0 is based on a completely rewritten codebase and is a dramatic departure from the previous versions of vRealize Automation. vRealize Automation 8.0 is an on-premise release of the VMware vRealize Automation Cloud SaaS offering that has been available for a while now. The platform consists of 3 components: Cloud Assembly, Cloud Broker, and Code Stream. The new vRealize Automation 8.0 virtual appliance includes these components as well as an integrated version of vRealize Orchestrator 8.

I have been using vRealize Operations to monitor the compliance of virtual machines against the DISA VMware vSphere Virtual Machine STIG for quite some time now. With the release of the new VMware vSphere 6.5 Virtual Machine STIG, I have discovered that vRealize Operations does not collect all the necessary information out of the box to verify compliance with the new STIG rules. Rather than waiting for VMware to provide an update to vRealize Operations, I decided to utilize vRealize Orchestrator to add custom properties to the virtual machines in vRealize Operations using the vRealize Operations REST API.

Have you ever wished that you could automatically execute a custom workflow in response to an alert generated in vRealize Operations? In previous releases of vRealize Operations, there wasn’t an easy way of accomplishing this. While there were many actions that could be executed using the built-in VMware vSphere solution, there wasn’t an easy built-in method to execute custom actions. With the introduction of the VMware vRealize Operations Management Pack for vRealize Orchestrator, VMware has finally made this possible.