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VMware vRealize Automation – vRA7 – Custom Hostnaming Extension for vRA7 and beyond

THIS EXTENSION IS NO LONGER MAINTAINED

I want to thank all of you that have downloaded and used this module.  We never expected it to be as widely used as it has been.  We decided to stop maintaining this because it was originally built as an example of how one could achieve this capability.  Much to our surprise it has been deployed into countless production environments.  As a result we have received countless requests for support which we cannot provide.

Their is good news however.  Their is a commercially available supported product that is capable to doing much more than this module is capable of.  For more information   See article on SovLabs Hostname Module 

Overview

One of the most frequent asks when using vRA is, “How do I deploy machines using my company’s hostnaming standards automatically using vRA?”  Since the out-of-the box hostnaming only provides a way to do prefix-suffix, the answer to this question usually is that it will require customization.

This solution is intended to provide a way to implement this functionality by using a small, highly versatile custom extension which can handle 95% of use cases without writing custom code.

The rest of this article contains instructions on installing and configuring the vRA Custom Hostnaming Extension.  This extension allows administrators to model very specific custom hostnaming schemes for their vRA virtual machines, Deployments, and vCloud Director vApps using vRA custom properties, with dynamic creation of stock machine prefixes and index tracking for each unique hostname combination.

This extension is proof-of-concept or demo grade.  While it runs well and consistently, it has not been put through a formal quality assurance process, so please use with caution.

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vRealize Automation 6.x – vRA6–Performing Day 2 operations against Multi-Machine Blueprints

Have you ever tried to build a day 2 operation for use with Multi-Machine applications?  Well if you have chances are you hit the same issue one of my colleagues Pontus ran in to when he first attempted.  Pontus however didn’t give up when he discovered there is no Object type to tie the action to.  Instead he dug deeper and deeper until he found a solution.  If you find yourself needing this capability or have found yourself banging your head for hours trying to figure this out you should check out Pontus’s post on virtualviking.net.  The post can be found at http://virtualviking.net/2015/11/13/day-two-operations-on-multi-machine-blueprints-in-vrealize-automation-6-2/

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vCloud Automation Center – vCAC 5.2/6.0 – Custom Hostnaming Extension v3.1

Overview

One of the most frequent asks when using vCAC is, “How do I deploy machines using my company’s hostnaming standards automatically using vCAC?”  Since the out-of-the box hostnaming only provides a way to do prefix-suffix, the answer to this question usually is that it will require customization.

This solution is intended to provide a way to implement this functionality by using a small, highly versatile custom extension which can handle 95% of use cases without writing custom code.

The rest of this article contains instructions on installing and configuring the vCAC Custom Hostnaming Extension.  This extension allows administrators to model very specific custom hostnaming schemes for their vCAC virtual machines, multi-machine services, and vCloud Director vApps using vCAC custom properties, with dynamic creation of stock machine prefixes and index tracking for each unique hostname combination.

This extension is Continue reading “vCloud Automation Center – vCAC 5.2/6.0 – Custom Hostnaming Extension v3.1”

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vCloud Automation Center -vCAC 5.1 – Conifiguring Multi-Machine Services

A Multi-Machine service is a Blueprint that is configured to deploy multiple blueprints/machines from one request. Essentially let’s say you have a blueprint that is configured to deploy a Windows 2008 Server with SQL, and you have another blueprint that is configured to deploy a Windows 2008 Server with an application installed such as vCAC. You can create a Multi-Machine service blueprint that contains both blueprints. You Multi-Machine service can be vCAC Server and when it’s requested it will deploy both blueprints each with their own configuration as well as overall multi-machine configuration that can be laid on top.

If you think about it vCAC can manage different hyperervisor such as vSphere through vCenter or vCD, Hyper-V, XenServer, it can manage Physical Servers, and external Amazon EC2 resources. So you can have individual blueprints configured to deploy to these different types of infrastructure. This gives you incredible flexibility. You could have a Multi-Machine service that has a blueprint that provisions an application server to a vSphere environment, a database server to a physical server, and multiple web servers to Amazon EC2. So let’s see how we configure a basic Multi-Machine Service.

Be sure that you have completed the steps in the below posts before configuring a multi-machine service:

First things first. We need at least two blueprints to be able to create a multi-machine service so let’s make a second blueprint. This can be done very easily by making an existing blueprint copyable. To do this perform the following:
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