Caution: Articles written for technical not grammatical accuracy, If poor grammar offends you proceed with caution ;-)
FIlter vRealize Automation 6.2 has been released. This release although not a Major Version packs a pretty powerful punch. It’s loaded with new features and enhancements that you are all going to want. This release aims to add some features that solve some basic challenges that have been seen by many of you running the product in your production environments. Here is a breakdown of what is new in this release:
- vCloud Air EndPoint with support for Proxy Servers with vCloud Air
- Configurable email tempaltes
- Calendar of Events
- Use IaaS custom properties within Application Services (Application Services)
- Support for CloudFoundry as a deployment target (Application Services)
- vRealize Operations Integration including health badges in vRA Portal.
- XenDesktop 7.x Support
- Support for OpenStack Havana
- Ability to edit Custom Properties during approval time
- Scheduler for reconfigure operations
- Ability to change lease times to indefinite
- Enhanced Event and Audit Logging
- Log Bundle tool
- VM Disk Support for up to 60 disks (Previously 15)
- Improved Rest API
- API for Reservation Management
- Better control for DB log rollover
- Swap Space Custom Property to account for swap space on disk
- Filter Catalog by Business Groups
- Enhanced installation for easier HA deployments
- UI Performance Improvements
As you can see from the list above there has been quiet a bit of enhancements made in this release. My three favorite enhancements are the ability to use IaaS Custom Properties within Application Services, vRealize Integration, & Enhanced Event and Audit Logging. There is something here for everyone so pick your favorites and try them out. Below is additional information on some of the new enhancements.
Calendar of Events
New in 6.2 the calendar function from the old DynamicOps days is returning with punch. This functionality will allow end users to see important events like leases expiring, machines being archived as well as events for all Object in vRA on the calendar.
vCloud Air Endpoint
New in the vRA 6.2 release is that the vCloud Director endpoint has been updated to be called vCloud Air endpoint and is complete with a new field to allow administrators to supply a proxy server to allow the system to reach the internet.
Use IaaS custom properties within Application Services
New in 6.2 IaaS blueprint properties will appear when requesting Application services (previously Application Director). This means that if you have a vRA IaaS blueprint and you build an application service blueprint which uses that blueprint, any and all properties associated with that IaaS blueprint will be associated to the machine in vRealize Application Services once it’s been provisioned. This allows you to build in user prompted fields that are needed in order to provision the application infrastructure while still layering the applications on top with the application service functionality.
Configurable Email Templates
Not only are you able to edit the email template body and subject, you can also create a default template and overrides for each of the tenants within vRA.
vRealize Operations Integration
New in 6.2 is the ability for vRA to pull information from vR Ops 6 in order to display health information and support reclamation as well as to identify and reclaim idle VMs.
Edit custom properties at Approval
New to vRA 6.2 is the ability to edit not only pre-defined properties when the approval is accessed, but also custom properties as well. This functionality works for multi-machine, single machine, and ASD requests. Limitation to this functionality is that these custom properties will not use the property dictionary during the approval and you cannot set conditional approvals based on the custom fields.
Swap Space Custom Property
A new property called VirtualMachine.Storage.ReserveMemory has been added to allow customers to ensure that space on storage will be saved and allocated to memory swap. This means that if you enable this setting and the VM has 1 GB of memory and 5 GB of storage, that 6 GB total storage will be allocated and reserved for this machine in vRA.
You can download vRA 6.2 here.
The release notes can be found here.
vRealize Orchestrator Plugin for vRealize Automation 6.2.0
Along with the release of vRA 6.2 there is also an updated vRealize Orchestrator Plugin v6.2.0 that you can download from here.
The release notes can be found here.
New in the vRealize Orchestrator plugin for vRealize Automation v6.2.0 is:
- vCenter Orchestrator Plug-In for vCloud Automation Center 6.2 works with vRealize Automation 6.2 and vRealize Orchestrator 6.0.0.
- The
ResquestsHelper.setFormValuesmethod and theResquestsHelper.setLiteralMapValuesmethod are no longer restricted to primitive types for entry values. For example,DecimalLiteral, IntegerLiteral,andStringLiteralare now directly accepted as values for entries. - New Create an Approval Policy and Add an approval level workflows for creating vRealize Automation approval policies.
- New workflows for content management allow you to validate and share Advanced Service Designer content between tenants or between vRealize Automation hosts.
Question (I’m sorry if this is the wrong place): But is there a reason why for a medium-sized distributed (HA) installation of vCAC 6.x, the Webserver and the Manager Service cannot coexist on one VM, in order to keep the amount of VMs (and hence maintenance work) down? Any reference architecture I’ve been looking at had the Manager and the Web service separated on different machines.
Only scalability. If you environment is not extremely large you will be fine. If you are looking to deploy more than two webservers then you would want to break them apart.