Caution: Articles written for technical not grammatical accuracy, If poor grammar offends you proceed with caution ;-)
If you were at VMworld and caught the Day 1 General Session you may have heard Pat Gelsinger say “The rule of the cloud – Ruthlessly Automate Everything”. This should be a wakeup call for anyone who has not begun or has done very little with automation.
How does one go about ruthlessly automating everything? You begin with the vRealize Suite. More specifically you begin with vRealize Automation. Automation isn’t easy, well it didn’t use to be easy. I should know I have been doing it for over 10 years. Automation has gotten a whole lot easier with off the shelf integrations like those that we provide at SovLabs. I remember the many pains of automating over the years.
In the DynamicOps days it weas learning .Net and Windows Worklow Foundation, then after the VMware acquisition it was learning java/javascript and vRealize Orchestrator. Of course you have to also know Powershell, and Pearl or Bash Script as well. Now I can’t say all of this is a thing of the past, but what I can say is if you want to integrate to the top 80%+ of IT use cases that exists today, those are easy.
Want to bend vRA to your more easily meet your needs without building vRO workflows and writing javascript? We can help with that as well. Many of you have heard of SovLabs, but just know us as the Ansible or F5 plugin ghuys, or one of the other endpoint integrations we provide. What most don’t know is that we provide vRA platform enhancements as well. Enhancement like:
Template Engine
The template engine adds the ability to put login right in the value field of a custom property. How awesome is that, no need to build a vRO workflow and script to provide some logic for your decision making. It’s just awesome!
Property Toolkit
Every wanted a single selection that you took from a user to set more than one custom property? Well you can do exactly that with the property toolkit. It allows you to basically templatize what an input means. Basically if you ask a user what environment is the machine for (Prod, Dev, test, etc) Instead of just getting the value of Production you can set properties that impact what that means to different aspects of the deployment. What does it mean for yourt hostname, network selection, vCenter Foder, AD OU, AD Group Assignment, vSphere DRS, Tagging, and so on.
vSphere Tagging
This is an essential these days. With just about all of the VMware products utilizing tags it’s tough to get along without it. Want a VM to be automatically assigned to the property monitoring group in vRops automagically, use vSphere tags. Want to implement chargeback or showback easily, you guessed it use vShpere tags.
Lifecycle Components Toolkit
This platform enhancement is aloit of things, but to put it simply, want to execute scripts inside your guest OS without using an additional agent, this is the module for you. Oh, did I mention it doesn’t require vRA Enterprise?
I could ramble on all day about all the different modules SovLabs has, but that is not the point. The point of this article is “The rule of the cloud – Ruthlessly Automate Everything”. So to answer the question, how do you make it work, vRA and the modules from SovLabs can help you make it work and get there quickly and easily. Want to have automation up and running in just a few week as opposed to many many months. Check out the SovLabs modules and stay tuned as I walk you through my mock company use cases and show you how to Ruthlessly Automate Everything.