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Platypus Project Update

platypusOver the weekend Roman, Grant, John and I released a significant update to the platypus project, which is essentially a very simple and elegant way to provide a Swagger based documentation of several VMware Products.  This project started out by providing a quick way to consume the vRealize Automation 7 API, but it has grown a healthy set of legs.

One of the goals of the project was to take publicly available specifications and make them consumable and adaptable by the larger community.

So,  what’s new? Everything.

  • Flexibility: When you run the docker container, there is the option to provide variables for Product Name and Product Version.
  • Product Support: The updated platypus project now includes vRealize Operations 6.2,  vRealize Orchestrator 7.0, and NSX 6.2.
  • Host Config: The host variable now provides the ability to input the hostname of an instance of the VMware Product in question (preferably a test/dev instance) and issue the REST API calls.

To get your hands dirty with the NSX version of Platypus, just issue the following command:

docker run –name platypus –rm -p 80:8080 -e PRODUCT=”nsx” -e VERSION=”6.2″ vmware/platypus

Interested in checking the platypus project out? Find out more at https://github.com/vmware/platypus.  If you are interested in contributing to the project, simply issue a PR.

Please leave your feedback or comments below, I’d love to hear from you.

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VMware vSphere 6 – Manually upgrading vSphere 6.0 to vSphere 6.0 Update 2 with ease

You have read all the announcements about vSphere 6.0 Update 2 being released and now you want to upgrade.  Maybe you haven’t tried out the embedded web ui and are tired on needing to use the thick client when your VC goes down.  Whatever the reason applying the update is pretty easy and straight forward.

Updating vCenter Appliance

First things first we need to upgrade vCenter to Update 2.  To do this manually you will first need to download the vSphere patch iso VMware-vCenter-Server-Appliance-6.0.0.20000-3634791-patch-FP.iso from myvmware.  Once you have downloaded the iso simply follow these steps to apply the update:

Continue reading “VMware vSphere 6 – Manually upgrading vSphere 6.0 to vSphere 6.0 Update 2 with ease”

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VMware Sample Exchange beta

It dawned on me that you all may not be aware of the VMware Sample Exchange.  The sample exchange is a place where you can go to find samples shared by many different folks.  Some by VMware employees others by customers, and partners.  On the sample exchange you can share all sorts of things from sample code written in many different languages, vRO workflows, blueprints, and more.  With the ability to turn blueprints into code in vRA7 the sample exchange makes it possible to share those blueprints with others and the best part is it’s free!

I encourage all of you to participate.  The more of you that share your work the better this community will become for all.

Continue reading “VMware Sample Exchange beta”

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VMware vRealize Automation – vRA7 and vRB7 – Automate Cost Calculations

There’s a known issue when you have both vRealize Automation and vRealize Business 7.x integrated when you have a newly created blueprint to deploy it may fail with an error “Cannot calculate cost. Contact your system administrator to review the vRA appliance logs.”  Typically this means vRB hasn’t run a cost calculation on the new blueprint to determine the cost of the blueprint.  You either have to wait up to 12 hours for the cost collection to run or you can manually force a collection by triggering a vRA Data Collection and a Cost Calculation as shown below.

Continue reading “VMware vRealize Automation – vRA7 and vRB7 – Automate Cost Calculations”

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vSphere 6 Update 2 finally brings a full web client

I haven’t worked closely with vSphere much as most of my automation work has been 100% focused on not caring about what the infrastructure underneath actually looks like. It is however deeply ingrained in me based on my many years working for a global manufacturer who standardized on vSphere. I still fully remember every moment of managing hundreds of vSphere hosts and multiple vCenters across the globe! I can tell you without question if any communication with vCenter was lost then it was all about trying to manage that host.

Continue reading “vSphere 6 Update 2 finally brings a full web client”

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New author and guest authors on dailyhypervisor

I’m happy to inform everyone that dailyhypervisor has a new author that will be bringing you some great cloud management content.  Chris Lennon a very talented individual on the VMware National Software Defined Enterprise Solution Engineering Team.  Chris has expert knowledge in vRealize Automation, vRealize Operations,  vRealize Log Insight, vRealize Configuration manager, and more.   You can check out Chris’s bio here.

Dailyhypervisor is also getting some new guest bloggers as well.  I would like to also welcome Gary Coburn and Paul Gifford as guest bloggers who will also be posting articles related to cloud automation and the software defined datacenter.  Look for some great new content to from these great new contributors.

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VMware vRealize Automation – vRA7 – Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

vRA has a great UI for provisioning VM’s, but with developers needing infrastructure on demand and wanting to have the ability for continuous integration.  With the new and updated vRA API’s you can now easily code your own deployment scripts or recipes and integrate with your own run books and still get the the governance and lifecycle management that vRA has to offer. Continue reading “VMware vRealize Automation – vRA7 – Infrastructure as Code (IaC)”

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VMware vRealize Automation – vRA7 – The dawn of the vRealize Automation 7 Event Broker

vRA 7 introduced a number of new and very useful features such as unified blueprints, software components, event broker, and others.  The event broker however has proven itself to be one of the most power new features we have seen in some time.  How so you ask?  Well if you have been working with vRA for any period of time you will remember the old way of triggering external workflow executions such as those run by vRO.  If you have been using vRA for a really long time you will remember back before vRO when vRA wasn’t even vRA and run nothing but .Net workflows, but we won’t go back that far.

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VMware vRealize Automation – vRA7 – Custom Hostnaming Extension for vRA7 and beyond

THIS EXTENSION IS NO LONGER MAINTAINED

I want to thank all of you that have downloaded and used this module.  We never expected it to be as widely used as it has been.  We decided to stop maintaining this because it was originally built as an example of how one could achieve this capability.  Much to our surprise it has been deployed into countless production environments.  As a result we have received countless requests for support which we cannot provide.

Their is good news however.  Their is a commercially available supported product that is capable to doing much more than this module is capable of.  For more information   See article on SovLabs Hostname Module 

Overview

One of the most frequent asks when using vRA is, “How do I deploy machines using my company’s hostnaming standards automatically using vRA?”  Since the out-of-the box hostnaming only provides a way to do prefix-suffix, the answer to this question usually is that it will require customization.

This solution is intended to provide a way to implement this functionality by using a small, highly versatile custom extension which can handle 95% of use cases without writing custom code.

The rest of this article contains instructions on installing and configuring the vRA Custom Hostnaming Extension.  This extension allows administrators to model very specific custom hostnaming schemes for their vRA virtual machines, Deployments, and vCloud Director vApps using vRA custom properties, with dynamic creation of stock machine prefixes and index tracking for each unique hostname combination.

This extension is proof-of-concept or demo grade.  While it runs well and consistently, it has not been put through a formal quality assurance process, so please use with caution.

Continue reading “VMware vRealize Automation – vRA7 – Custom Hostnaming Extension for vRA7 and beyond”