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The OneFuse Active Directory (AD) module offers features for placing deployed computer objects into the appropriate Active Directory (AD) organizational units (OU). This includes support for pre-build organization units (OU), final Organizational Unit placement, as well as placement of computer objects into Active Directory (AD) security groups.
Continue reading “Creating a OneFuse Active Directory Policy”
In this article we are going to add OneFuse DNS support to a vRA8 blueprint. If you have been following my previous articles you probably have an idea of how this is going to work. We are going to build upon the examples from previous articles by leveraging the same blueprint that we created in the article “vRA8 with OneFuse: IPAM integration”.
By the end of this article, we will have a blueprint that leverages OneFuse to generate a name, assign Network/IP Address as well as create DNS records for the deployed machine. Although these examples are simple and static, they are setting the foundation for future articles where we will dive into creating more flexible and dynamic blueprints.
Continue reading “vRA8 with OneFuse: DNS Integration”
Automating the creation of DNS records is becoming increasingly more important in the enterprise. One bad record or typo can cause outages or mission critical services. In this article, I’m going to walk through creating a DNS Policy in OneFuse using Infoblox as a DNS provider.
Continue reading “Creating a OneFuse DNS Policy”
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.
In the “Getting Started with the OneFuse Property Toolkit” article we looked at ways the property toolkit can be leveraged to help standardize configurations across platforms. We also look at a few of the capabilities that it offers. In this article we are going to look at some of the ways the Property Toolkit can be utilized within vRA8.
Continue reading “vRA with OneFuse: Property Toolkit”
OneFuse IPAM policies have some special qualities that make managing IPAM integrations very easy, flexible, and portable. IPAM policies in OneFuse define the network or networks they represent abstracted from the actual IPAM provider. This offers many benefits over network definitions that are tightly tied to a specific provider. This allows for the use of more than one provider in the environment, it also allows for easy migration from one IPAM provider to another.
Continue reading “Creating a OneFuse IPAM Policy”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.
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.
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”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.
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?
ServiceNow Connector 2019.8.0
What’s New?
Import Catalog Item / Modify Catalog Item Mapping Page Enhancements
Improvements/Resolved Issues
Resolved Issues
To see previous feature releases please visit the SovLabs support website here.