ANsible – Dailyhypervisor

May 29, 2019December 12, 2019

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.

Requesting a vRealize Automation deployment from Ansible. How, and why you would want to do it.
The SovLabs Ansible Tower Module for vRealize Automation with Static Inventory
The SovLabs Ansible Tower Module for vRealize Automation with Dynamic Inventory
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.

May 23, 2019May 22, 2019

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
  - Activate your SovLabs License key at https://license.sovlabs.com
  - Detailed instructions can be found here
- 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.

August 9, 2017

SovLabs – Solutions for VMware vRealize Automation

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.

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