Caution: Articles written for technical not grammatical accuracy, If poor grammar offends you proceed with caution ;-)
If you have been to the VMware Solutions Exchange you most certainly have seen the name SovLabs. Although their solutions are regularly called plug-ins, I assure you they offer more than just orchestrator-based plug-ins. I first started working with their solutions earlier this year and I was instantly hooked. Many of you have used vRO extensions that were made available by Tom Bonanno or myself posted here on Dailyhypervisor. One in particular is the custom hostname extension for vRA. While that extension has helped hundreds if not more of you, many of you quickly discovered the downside of using it. That downside being management overhead and lack of support. As much as we would have liked to offer support to those in need we simply don’t have the bandwidth to do so. Even upgrading the extension we put out for new versions of vRA in a timely manner had its challenges for us.
Enter SovLabs. Not only do they have a vast selection of integrations and extensions in their solution, they have enterprise support for them as well. In the ever-growing world of Enterprise Datacenter Automation, having good reliable support is a must. This is however just one of the many reasons I highly recommend SovLabs and the solutions they offer. If you have used one of the extensions from Dailyhypervisor, you’ll recall what it took to configure and use. If you haven’t, then consider yourself lucky. With the SovLabs solutions aka modules, you install their plug-in once into vRO, run one workflow to configure it for use with vRA, and everything beyond that is done through the vRA user interface.
SovLabs has 29 modules and counting, available for use with vRA with a common framework that ties them together. Modules like Custom Naming, Active Directory, ServiceNow, Puppet, Ansible Tower, F5, and IPAM and DNS integrations from a wide variety of vendors such as SolarWinds, Bluecat, Men & Mice, Infoblox, BT and more. Once the SovLabs plug-in is installed you can configure and manage every aspect of each module through vRA. This however is only half the picture. Their solution comes with the SovLabs Framework that extends across all their modules. I’m not going to get into all the technical details in this article, but it offers some excellent flexibility. This is the first in many articles I will be writing about the SovLabs solutions. I will be writing a number of articles each month focusing on the SovLabs framework and the modules giving you everything you need to understand what they have to offer.
Folks I really can’t say enough good things about these guys and the extensions that they have built and continue to expand upon. Tom and I have been involved in many cloud extensibility projects over the years, and being able to build on enterprise-grade extensions for vRA versus custom coding can make all the difference. Aside from their great integrations, they also have some top notch folks working over there as well. If you are looking for specific info, want an introduction, or anything at all just let me know.
In my next article I will be covering: Installing the SovLabs vRO plugin and configuring for use with vRA.
