SovLabs vRealize Automation Optimization and Upgrade Analysis Tool

SovLabs has been busy developing a tool that is intended to analyse your vRealize Automation 7 environment and provide helpful feedback on areas where you can optimize.  The tool collects data on dozens of vRealize Automation 7 constructs such as number of blueprints, types of blueprints, number of business groups, network profiles, reservations, etc. and looks for key indicators to see if there is room for optimization.  It also goes a step further and looks for items that could create challenges when customers are looking to migrate to vRealize Automation 8.

The goal here is to optimize your vRealize Automation 7 environments before adopting vRealize Automation 8.  We all acknowledge that vRealize Automation 7 will be around for at least another 18-24 months –  if not longer. Even if you are making the move to vRealize Automation 8 today, you will likely still be maintaining your vRealize Automation 7 environments alongside for some time to come. By optimizing your vRealize Automation 7 environments you will be reducing the maintenance overhead required for your current environment while also making it easier to migrate and adopt your solution on vRealize Automation 8.  The more aligned the two instances are, the simpler it will be to maintain both environments side by side.

The best part is it’s free, yes that is correct I said free.  You simply register at https://www.sovlabs.com/vrealize-automation-optimization-assessment and, once registered, a member of the SovLabs team will reach out to assist you with the data collection.  The data is done using a vRO workflow that produces a JSON output. The data that is collected is non-identifying or sensitive so you don’t have to worry.  The data collected is also presented in plain text so you can review the data before you send it back to Sovlabs for analysis. If you have more than one vRealize Automation 7 environment you can run the collector for each environment and then zip all the files together for upload.

Once data collection is complete, you then head over to https://optimize.sovlabs.com/ and upload your results file.  From there the folks at SovLabs will take the result, run it through their analysis tool and produce a report detailing all the areas where you can optimize your vRealize Automation 7 environment(s).  A SovLabs technical representative will reach out to schedule a time to go over the report and send you a copy. Whether you are looking to Optimize your vRealize Automation 7 environment or gain some insight into your pending vRealize Automation 8 migration, the SovLabs Optimization and Upgrade Assessment provides great information and insights to help plan and prepare your automation path.

VMware vSphere 6 & NSX – Planning on upgrading to vSPhere 6 and in an environment with NSX?

So vSphere 6 launched last week and you want to kick the tires in your lab.  Hopefully before you install you head on over to VMware and check out the Interoperability Matrixes. I’ve been reading posts online about folks jumping in with both feet and just straight out upgrading to vSphere 6.  Of course I may have been one of those people myself.

I being who I am got all excited over the vSphere 6 release and all the new features it offers cracked open the upgrade guide and went all in with the vSphere 6 migration utility and migrated my vCenter 5.5 server to vCenter 6.  That’s half the battle right.  Get through the migration and everything will be golden.  Not quiet.  After the migration, (which went fairly smooth by the way) I launched the vSphere web client and went to login and noticed I was not able to login as myself.  Luckily the administrator@vsphere.local account was able to login with no issues.  I then started poking around and noticed I no longer had a link for Networking and Security.

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ESX is Going Away – How to Migrate to ESXi

If you didn’t know it yet, VMware announced a while back that future releases of VMware will not include the “traditional” ESX Server. From their site:“VMware vSphere 4.1 and its subsequent update and patch releases are the last releases to include both ESX and ESXi hypervisor architectures. Future major releases of VMware vSphere will include only the ESXi architecture.”

If you are in a “24/7/365” shop then the applications running in your private cloud should currently be in virtual data centers (vDC) that are contained in DRS/HA clusters and the migration can be completed with no downtime to the applications. However, there are still other systems, such as development and test systems or possibly some minor infrastructure services applications that may not benefit from vSphere’s availability features. I know many people have scheduled outages, shutdowns, etc. during the upcoming holidays. It may the best time to migrate to ESXi.

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