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OneFuse Property Toolkit is now FREE

Yes you read the title correct. Cloudbolt is now giving away the Property Toolkit capability that is part of OneFuse for FREE. If you are not familiar with the OneFuse or its Property Toolkit capabilities below are some links to help get you familiar:

The OneFuse Property Toolkit is the Swiss army knife of the OneFuse Platform.  It can be used in many different ways to assist you in meeting your automation needs.  It can be used to simplify configurations, define business logic as configuration, build simple logic or tackle the most complex problems.  In its simplest form its meta-data that can be used as a reference offering simple name value pairs that can be used as a reference for decision making.  In its most powerful form it can contain logic, decision trees, platform abstractions, and much more.

It’s a blank canvas waiting to solve the needs of any organization.  A common use for the Property Toolkit is to centrally define organizational business logic as configuration that can be used to standardize across different tools allowing you to centralize your business logic and maintain standards across the organization.

Stay tuned for more articles on how you can use this awesome free capability to help achieve your automation goals.

To stay up to date on the latest OneFuse developments, ask questions, share use cases, or just say hello head over to https://onefuse.cloudbolt.io and signup for the OneFuse community.

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SovLabs vRealize Automation Optimization and Upgrade Analysis Tool

SovLabs has been busy developing a tool that is intended to analyse your vRealize Automation 7 environment and provide helpful feedback on areas where you can optimize.  The tool collects data on dozens of vRealize Automation 7 constructs such as number of blueprints, types of blueprints, number of business groups, network profiles, reservations, etc. and looks for key indicators to see if there is room for optimization.  It also goes a step further and looks for items that could create challenges when customers are looking to migrate to vRealize Automation 8.

The goal here is to optimize your vRealize Automation 7 environments before adopting vRealize Automation 8.  We all acknowledge that vRealize Automation 7 will be around for at least another 18-24 months –  if not longer. Even if you are making the move to vRealize Automation 8 today, you will likely still be maintaining your vRealize Automation 7 environments alongside for some time to come. By optimizing your vRealize Automation 7 environments you will be reducing the maintenance overhead required for your current environment while also making it easier to migrate and adopt your solution on vRealize Automation 8.  The more aligned the two instances are, the simpler it will be to maintain both environments side by side.

The best part is it’s free, yes that is correct I said free.  You simply register at https://www.sovlabs.com/vrealize-automation-optimization-assessment and, once registered, a member of the SovLabs team will reach out to assist you with the data collection.  The data is done using a vRO workflow that produces a JSON output. The data that is collected is non-identifying or sensitive so you don’t have to worry.  The data collected is also presented in plain text so you can review the data before you send it back to Sovlabs for analysis. If you have more than one vRealize Automation 7 environment you can run the collector for each environment and then zip all the files together for upload.

Once data collection is complete, you then head over to https://optimize.sovlabs.com/ and upload your results file.  From there the folks at SovLabs will take the result, run it through their analysis tool and produce a report detailing all the areas where you can optimize your vRealize Automation 7 environment(s).  A SovLabs technical representative will reach out to schedule a time to go over the report and send you a copy. Whether you are looking to Optimize your vRealize Automation 7 environment or gain some insight into your pending vRealize Automation 8 migration, the SovLabs Optimization and Upgrade Assessment provides great information and insights to help plan and prepare your automation path.

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vRealize Automation 8 – A first look at vRA8 Migration Assessment Tool: Part 2 of 2

In Part 1 of this two-part series on the vRealize Automation Migration Assessment Tool, we looked at the vRA8 migration tool to see how it might help you plan your migration from vRA7 to vRA8.  In this article, we are going to look at what it will take to migrate your custom workflows from vRA7 to vRA8.  To start, we will explore what a custom workflow looks like to day in vRA7.

SIGN UP FOR THE VRA8 BLOG SERIES & WEBINAR

vRA7 Workflow Components

In vRA7, there are a number of components that come together to make the magic happen.  Each component plays a vital role in how you design, build, and invoke your customizations.

Event Broker

The event broker was introduced in vRA7 to make it easier to trigger the workflow stubs that existed within the IaaS server.  These stubs were always there, but only a handful were accessible and they were not easy to configure. The Event Broker also introduced a more granular way to decide when a workflow should or should not be executed.  Although the event broker has dozens of events you could subscribe to the following were the most commonly used:

  • Machine Requested
  • Building Machine
  • Machine Provisioned
  • Machine Activated
  • Machine Destroyed

Many of these states included a pre and a post execution allowing you to decide if you wanted to execute your workflow before of after vRA’s execution of that state.  These states that are the core of vRA7 extensibility no longer exist in vRA8. vRA8 is a completely new platform, written from the ground up, and no longer includes the IaaS host that controlled all of these states in vRA7.

Read the full article here

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A VMware Admin’s First Impressions of vRealize Automation 8 (vRA8) — Part 2 of 2

Article by Mike Bombard

Welcome to Part 2 of 2 of our “First Impressions” of vRA8 article. In Part 1, we discussed what’s new, good, not so good, and really good about Documentation and Tagging in vRA8. Below, we discuss ABX and policies, which are both very new and very different in vRA8.

Action Based Extensibility (ABX), vRealize Orchestrator and Extensibility

ABX is the new extensibility offering packaged with vRA8 (in addition to vRealize Orchestrator) that uses a FaaS provider (AWS, Azure and On Prem offered today) to provide extensibility for the new platform. As someone who has spent countless hours working with vRO, ABX is probably one of the more intriguing announcements surrounding vRA8. 

One of the things that I am impressed with right out of the gate is that the ABX action runs show you the code that was used as well as the payload that was passed for use in the action. In fact, both Orchestrator and ABX runs can be monitored directly from the Cloud Assembly UI. No more having to log in to a separate interface to see what is happening with your extensibility. This methodology makes troubleshooting much more accessible.

A VMware Admin’s First Impressions of vRealize Automation 8 (vRA8) 1

Read the full article here

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A VMware Admin’s First Impressions of vRealize Automation 8 (vRA8) — Part 1 of 2

Article by Mike Bombard

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.

Read the full article here

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vRealize Automation 8 – A First Look at the vRA8 Migration Assessment Tool — Part 1 of 2

vRealize Automation veterans may still remember the migrations from vRA 5.x to 6.x and 6.x to 7.x. However, for many enterprises utilizing vRealize Automation, the migration from vRA 7.x to vRA 8.x will be your first major vRA migration. In an ideal world these migrations would only take a few clicks of the mouse.  Migrating from vRA7.x to vRA8.x is going to be a lot like switching banks. Trying to figure out all the services that have your bank card on file for automatic billing and moving over automatic bill payments is tedious and time consuming. Which payments are monthly, quarterly, annually, and for how much? Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a simple tool to identify and update all the services that you have on auto-pay?

SIGN UP FOR THE VRA8 BLOG SERIES & WEBINAR

vRealize Automation is a lot like that.  Whether it’s frequently deployed common workloads, special purpose blueprints that are used a few times a month, quarterly, or a handful or fewer times a year, or software customizations specific to vRA, you have to identify everything that will require hand-holding when you begin the migration from vRA7 to vRA8. The good news is that, unlike your bank, VMware does offer a migration assessment tool to help you determine if your blueprints are ready to be migrated from vRA7 to vRA8. As of this writing, we have not yet learned if the migration assessment tool will determine if your customizations and workloads are ready for migration.

Read the full article here.

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Request vRealize Automation Blueprints with Ansible Tower

Integrating Red Hat Ansible Tower with VMware vRealize Automation is a very popular enterprise automation solution. SovLabs has several excellent integrations that can help you accomplish and scale your integration of these two powerful cloud automation tools. This article is the first in a series of four articles covering the integration of Red Hat Ansible Tower with VMware vRealize Automation, based primarily on the content and discussion from our webinar with Red Hat Ansible on May 22.

  1. Requesting a vRealize Automation deployment from Ansible.  How, and why you would want to do it.
  2. The SovLabs Ansible Tower Module for vRealize Automation with Static Inventory
  3. The SovLabs Ansible Tower Module for vRealize Automation with Dynamic Inventory
  4. The SovLabs Ansible Tower Plug-in for vRealize Automation CM Framework

Requesting a vRealize Automation deployment from Ansible

With Ansible Tower quickly growing in popularity, many developers and system administrators want to be able to utilize Ansible Tower to deploy infrastructure.  This type of deployment is the subject of many debates within enterprise organizations, especially those with cloud teams trying to develop standards while enforcing policy and governance across organizations.

The good news is that organizations no longer have to choose between solutions. If you want to use Ansible to develop standards while enforcing policy and governance across organizations, now you can.  Using the solution below you can request workloads from Ansible facilitated by vRA to enforce the desired standards and governance policies. Let’s take a look at how it works.

Continue reading “Request vRealize Automation Blueprints with Ansible Tower”
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How to Create vRealize Automation Global Properties with the SovLabs Property Toolkit

If you have not yet read my recent series Harness the Power of vRealize Automation (vRA) with the SovLabs Property Toolkit and Template Engine, I would encourage you to do so. This 3-part series will provide you with some interesting ways to get more out of vRealize Automation using the software solutions provided by SovLabs. In this article I will be coveringa topic closely related to my previous articles and showcasing even more value when you use the SovLabs Property Toolkit.

Global Properties

If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me, “Is there a place to define global properties in vRA?” throughout my career, I probably could have retired by now.  The unfortunate answer to this question has always been “it does not”, but there is a way to apply properties to every request. Keep reading.

The Old Way

The old way to define global properties in vRA was to add the properties you wanted applied globally to each and every endpoint you had configured in vRA.  So, if you had 25 endpoints and 20 properties you ended up have to enter 500 properties and 500 values. This method leads to inevitable typos, finger fatigue, and management overhead every time you need to update a value for any one of those properties or add a new property.

To see the new more efficient way read the rest of the article on the SovLabs blog site here.

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SovLabs Plugin Release 2019.8.0 Now Available

SovLabs has released it’s latest version of it’s vRealize Automation plugin version 2019.8.0. Among other key updated it is Certified for vRealize Automation 7.6 as well as ServiceNow Madrid. Below is the full list of updates available in this release:

What’s New?

  • Certified for vRA 7.6!
  • SovLabs Licenses
    • A new SovLabs 2019.x license key is needed in order to use the SovLabs 2019.x Plug-in
    • A 2019.x license key is needed in order to use the SovLabs ServiceNow Connector 2019.8.0
  • SovLabs EULA has been updated!
    • During install of the SovLabs Plug-in and running SovLabs Configuration, the EULA now refers to https://sovlabs.com/eula
  • SovLabs Template Engine
    • Added new tags, filters and improvements!
      • Tags: decrement, ifchanged, increment
      • Filters: abs, at_least, at_most, ceil, compact, concat, floor, lstrip, newline_to_br, reverse, round, rstrip, slice, sort_natural, strip, uniq, url_decode and url_encode
      • Improvements
        • Allow “.” in variables
        • Enhanced parser error messages
        • Allow Unicode forward and backward “fancy” quotes
  • Puppet Enterprise
    • Added “2018.1” and “2019.1” into the Version dropdown list.  Previously verified on 2018.3.4 and 2019.2.0
  • ServiceNow CMDB
    • Added “Madrid” into the Version dropdown list.  Previously verified on 2019.2.0
  • Backup as a Service for Veeam
    • Support for Veeam 9.5, Update 4
    • Performance improvement for Backup Jobs with a large number of VMs
  • Backup as a Service for Cohesity
    • New Day2 Feature: Ability to Recover Virtual Disk that allows recovering an entire virtual disk – either by overwriting the existing disk or recovering to a new (unmounted) device

ServiceNow Connector 2019.8.0

What’s New?

  • A 2019.x license key is needed in order to use the SovLabs ServiceNow Connector 2019.8.0
  • Supports Madrid
  • Added ability to enable the vRA Business Group to be selected at request time by the end-user in ServiceNow when ordering the Catalog request

Import Catalog Item / Modify Catalog Item Mapping Page Enhancements

  • New field for “Override vRA Business Group?”
  • Updated “Constant” label to “Template”

Improvements/Resolved Issues

  • Error logs in ServiceNow and ServiceNow Mid Server
  • ServiceNow request to show useful error when the request is unable to be generated in vRA
  • Hid unnecessary fields during Import/Modify for a vRA Blueprint

Resolved Issues

  • Ansible Tower
    • Fixed issue for Static Inventory failing when no dynamic groups are defined.
  • Ansible Tower for CM Framework
    • Fixed error reporting to report back correct error when an IP address is not defined
    • Fixed the error similar to the following: “[WARNING]: * Failed to parse /tmp/awx_inventory_rNDKxh/tmpqWOvv0 with script plugin: Inventory script”
    • Fixed error when accidentally appending trailing “/” to vRO Hostname when creating the Ansible Tower Endpoint
  • Snapshot Management
    • Fixed issue for missing ID(s) from incomplete vRA CAFE/IaaS data that prevented successful mapping to managed VMs in vCenter.  Added checking and additional logging.
  • IPAM Framework
    • Fixed Release IP to release the IP address correctly

To see previous feature releases please visit the SovLabs support website here.

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Harness the Power of vRA with the SovLabs Property Toolkit and Template Engine – Part 3

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, we created three inputs for our vRealize Automation blueprint: Production, WordPress, SOX compliance.  These three inputs correspond to property groups that allow us to associate multiple custom properties to a single input. Using property groups allows us the ability to templatize how each input affects the outcome of a request.  In this article, the Genie that we’ve previously released from the proverbial bottle is about to take form, as we walk through how these three inputs come together to determine the outcome of our request.

Let’s look at how the different input options impact the different modules.

ModuleEnvironmentApplicationCompliance Convention Outcome(Prod, WordPress, SOX)
NamingProd = pDev = dLab = lWordPress = wpMSSQL = ms None = nSox = s{{env}}{{app}}{{comp}} pwps
IPAM NetworkProd = prodDev = devLab = lab Wordpress = webMSSQL = dbNone = nullSox = sox{{env}}{{app}}{{comp}}  prodwebsox
vCenter FolderProd = PRODDev = DEVLab = LAB  Wordpress = WORDPRESSMSSQL = MSSQLNone = nullSox = SOX \{{env}}\{{app}}\{{comp}} \PROD\WORDPRESS\SOX 
 vSphere TagsProdDevLabWordPressWeb ServerMicrosoft SQLDatabaseNo ComplianceSOX ComplianceSee vSphere tagging below ProdWordpressWeb ServerSOX 

To read the full article please visit the SovLabs Blog here.