In the middle of 2020, a plugin for managing vRealize Automation appeared in vRO, but its functionality is not enough to work with vRA: most tasks are still solved only through the REST API. I propose to use a ready-made package, it is constantly being finalized and already includes more than 100 different processes.
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vRA 8: Terraform as a Service
VRealize Automation 8.2 introduces an exciting new feature – the ability to provide Terraform as a service. It expands the vRA directory by adding cloud-based Terraform manifest templates. And Terraform adds an orchestrator, negotiation engine, and vRA lease management.
Continue readingTerraform + vRA. Custom deployment
Terraform vRA provider’s capabilities for creating deployments are not limited to working with cloud templates and catalog items . Deployments can be created entirely from scratch by building them as a constructor from a variety of resources. Which of the following methods is the best? Let’s first analyze the latter, then compare all three options.
Continue readingTerraform + vRA. Blueprints
The article Terraform + vRA. Quickstart a new deployment is created from an item published in the vRA directory. This is the easiest way to work with vRA from Terraform, but it is not flexible enough – there is no way to change the template schema, the deployments will be the same as the Cloud Assembly administrator decided. Terraform allows you to create your own cloud templates and deploy deployments from them.
Continue readingTerraform + vRA. Quick start
The vRealize Automation platform allows you not only to organize the work of the cloud, but also to work with it, describing the infrastructure as code (Incfastructure as Code – IaC ). One of the most common tools that implements this model and is already integrated with vRA is Terraform. Getting started with how Terraform and vRA 8 work together.
Continue readingvRO: vRA 8 Management Pack
Continuing smooth migration to vRealize Automation 8, API control is next in line. In vRO 7, the vCAC and vCACCAFE plugins were used to manage vRA, in the 8th version, only the REST API was used. There is no package from VMware yet, but processes are needed right now. To save time at the start, I suggest starting with a small set of basic processes.
Continue readingvRO: data from Kubernetes
With the advent of Kubernetes in the productive environment, automation is expanding from the level of hosts, clusters and virtual machines, including K8S objects: namespace , ingress , service , pod … Do you need to create another automation system specifically for Kubernetes or can you use vRealize Orchestrator, which is already integrated with your information systems?
Continue readingvRA 8: Integration with Polemarch
The previous two articles covered how vRealize Automation 8 works with Ansible Open Source. Our infrastructure already uses Polemarch to work with Ansible, but there is no integration with it in vRA 8. In order not to wait for the development of integration from VMware, we will do it ourselves using Custom Resources and Dynamic Types.
Continue readingvRA 8: Ansible + Kubernetes
The previous article vRA 8: Ansible Integration tested using Ansible to configure servers in vRealize Automation 8. Let’s see how this works on a real-world task – deploying a kubernetes cluster. There is a large selection of ready-made Ansible playbooks, one of the most advanced is Kubespray. Let’s develop a vRA blueprint to create a K8S cluster using Kubespray.
Continue readingvRA 8: Ansible Integration
Let’s start testing new features and preparing to migrate to vRealize Automition 8. Our vRA 7.x installation uses software components extensively to configure our servers. Therefore, the main question is how to configure the server if the software components are no longer there? vRA 8 offers several solutions: cloud-init, Ansible Tower and just Ansible (on a remote SSH server).
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