Caution: Articles written for technical not grammatical accuracy, If poor grammar offends you proceed with caution ;-)
Many of us have been eager to get our hands on vRealize Automation 8 (vRA8) for some time now. If any of you are like me, you may have dabbled in the Hands On Labs with vRealize Automation Cloud (formerly CAS) for the past year. But, without having the capability or the requisite login for the service, you kept abreast of any updates coming out of the vRAC camp. I have been through quite a few versions, upgrades, migrations and code changes in my time working with the vRealize products. Most of this experience was spent in architecture, engineering, and development at a large enterprise customer, where we had to carefully navigate each of these changes. This article covers some of my first impressions of vRA8 as an advanced user of the product since the early days, circa vRA6.
Introduction
There is a lot to cover here. The product has been re-written from the ground up. The Cafe and IaaS nodes that we are all familiar with are now gone. Custom workflows will most likely have to be completely re-written. Migrations will have to be planned and extensive testing required prior to any production deployment. It will likely take the better part of the next year for the community to get a handle on the new product. However, if you’re reading this blog post, you are probably actively engaged in working with vRA in some fashion, and you’re excited to see the new capabilities offered in vRA8.x.
The following is a two-part summary of some of the very high level aspects of the new system that have jumped out at me in the first 2-3 weeks of working with VMware’s reconstructed code for vRealize Automation. In part one, I explain my experience working with the Documentation of vRA8 and Tagging, the new way to manage your machine metadata. Part 2 will cover my take on ABX and Policies. Also, we’re going in depth on these and other topics in our December 10th webinar: Top vRA8 Deployment Considerations. Click here to sign up.