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VMware round of Q2 releases including vRA 7.1, vROPs 6.3, vRCS 2.1, Cloud Client 4.2, vRB 7.1 and more

Many of you may have already seen the news, but I like to create a roll up to make it easy to see what’s been newly released.  Yesterday Tuesday August 23rd 2016 VMware released a number of much awaited Management product updates.  See below for a breakdown of the updates per product.

 

vRealize Automation 7.1

 

What’s new?

vRealize Automation 7.1 is optimized for growing clouds thanks to significant improvements in the automated installation experience.

vRealize Automation 7.1 continue simplifying the primarily and secondary setup process by adding ability to automate the setup process among similar deployments leveraging the new Silent Installer. Cloud Admins are now able to scale out existing vRealize deployment by adding more vRA components and manage them automatically though the new Command Line(CLI) interface.

vRA 7.1 release is also equipped with a brand new Migration tool which allows you to perform safe and sound side by side upgrade (migration) existing vRealize Automation systems 6.2.X to the latest and greatest release. During the migration process the source production environment remains intact which guarantees a minimum downtime of the production environment.

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vRealize Code Stream – vRCS7 – vRealize Code Stream Management Pack for IT DevOps 2.0 has been released

If you haven’t looked at Code Stream, you may want to now.  Code Stream as you may or may not know is VMware’s DevOps product, but what you may not know is that with this management pack it adds some features to your vRA deployment that you may be interested in.  Now this isn’t totally new it is in version 2.0 as you can see.  The management pack allows you to utilize Code Stream to automate the SDDC lifecycle of templates, blueprints, workflows, dashboards, scripts and more within vRA.  This is pretty cool right.  If you want to use a blueprint for two tenants your can automate the lifecycle of these blueprints which I think is awesome.

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vRealize Code Stream – vRCS 1.x – Connecting Jenkins to Artifactory

So far I have covered how to setup Git, Eclipse, Jenkins, Code Stream, and a little Artifactory.  We have Eclipse checking code into Git and Jenkins pulling the code and simply building it into a tar.gz file.  We also have Code Stream setup to use Artifactory and established the means by which Code Stream will talk to Jenkins, but we are still missing some pieces we need before we can really dig into how to use Code Stream.  I know this may seem a bit confusing, but I promise it will all make sense very soon.

We now need to connect Jenkins to Artifactory.  Why you ask?  We are going to connect Jenkins to Artifactory so it can publish the tar,gz file as an artifact in the Artifactory repository.  We need to do this so we can later have code stream pull it from Artifactory.  the cool part is not only can we utilize this artifact with Code Stream, but it can be used with out solutions as well like vRealize Application Services if we wanted.  Ok let’s not get to far ahead.  In this article we are simply going to connect Jenkins to Artifactory and modify our build to publish the tar.gz file as an artifact to a repository.

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VRealize Code Stream – vRCS 1.0 – Laying the foundation with Git and Jenkins Part 2

In part 1 of this article we deployed both GitLab and Jenkins, configured a Git project and connected it to the Eclipse IDE.  In this article we will focus on configuring the Jenkins server to work with our GitLab repository and crate a Jenkins job to build our project.

Configuring Jenkins for GitLab

1. Before we can create a job we need to add some plugins to the Jenkins server for GitLab.  We need to make sure we have the following plugins installed by going to the Jenkins server, the Manage Jenkins, and then Manage Plugins.

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2. Next go to the “Installed” tab to see which if any of the needed plugins are already installed.  The plugings that are needed are:

  • Git Client Plugin
  • Git Plugin
  • GitHub API Plugin
  • GitHub Plugin
  • GitLab Plugin

 

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VRealize Code Stream – vRCS 1.0 – Laying the foundation with Git and Jenkins Part 1

I realize many of you looking to understand what Code Stream can do to help you with your Continuous Integration needs already have Git Jenkins and a whole ton of other tools. However for those who don’t yet have anything in place or for those who are looking to get a better understanding of where it fits into the mix I am going to walk through some simple setup examples to get you up and going.  To start we need to have two foundational elements in place; Git and Jenkins.

As part of the Git setup I’m going to help you get Git in place and tie your IDE (Eclipse) into Git for publishing code check-ins to your repository.  Then we will deploy a Jenkins server and integrate both Git with Jenkins to create simple builds that we can use with Code Stream.

What we need to get started

To begin we will need to have two servers deployed in the environment.  The first will be got Git and the second for Jenkins.  In my lab I deployed Centos 6.3 because I already had a template available.  I would recommend you have these deployed and ready.

 

Deploying a Git Server

I choose to use GitLab community edition for my Git server.  It seemed to offer the most options and flexibility for the lab.  The gitlab community edition is available at https://about.gitlab.com/downloads/.

Once you choose the version that appropriate for your OS version the installation is pretty simple.  Gitlab provides you with basic installation steps which as pretty straight forward.  Those installation steps for Centos 6 are:

Install Dependencies

sudo yum install openssh-server
sudo yum install postfix
sudo yum install cronie
sudo service postfix start
sudo chkconfig postfix on
sudo lokkit -s http -s ssh

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