The Issue After a power outage in my home lab I found that my vCenter server would no longer boot. An error in the console stated that there were issues with the file system and the System Check could not be started. Sounds pretty bad and I did...
An Introduction to Jobs In a series of posts, I am going to take you through setting up the Automation Config product, manually enabling management of deployed systems, creating a custom desired state and eventually integrating with your Cloud templates. This specific post will take you through the...
Manually Deploy Salt Minion In a series of posts, I am going to take you through setting up the Automation Config product, manually enabling management of deployed systems, creating a custom desired state and eventually integrating with your Cloud templates. This specific post will demonstrate how to install...
External Authentication In a series of posts, I am going to take you through setting up the Automation Config product, manually enabling management of deployed systems, creating a custom desired state and eventually integrating with your Cloud templates. This specific post will cover up configuring LDAP integration with...
Initial Deployment The Aria Automation Config system allows you to define the applications, files, and other settings that should be present on a given system. Once configured, the system is continuously evaluated against a configuration and changes are made as and when needed. Now tightly integrated into the...
In a series of posts, I am going to take you through setting up the Aria Automation Config product (formerly known as Salt), manually enabling management of deployed systems, creating a custom desired state and eventually integrating with your Cloud templates (and hopefully even more!) Series Overview Part...
Overview I recently wanted to create a template in vSphere that I would use from VMware Aria Automation. I did not want to use vSphere customisation specifications, but rather cloud-init (and just cloud-init). There are many posts out there all differing from one another on how to prepare...
Of late I have been working on a number of Cloud Templates that require quite an extensive set of custom properties to be set. These custom properties are used to enable further configuration to take place during the deployment process. Additionally, some contain computed values that are then...
I thought for a bit of a laugh I would challenge myself to create an ABX action to raise a Jira ticket when a deployment fails. In the end it wasn’t too difficult and it certainly shows that there could be some good further use cases for integration...
This cheat sheet will evolve over time to become a single source for all the things you forget, common questions with answers and anything else that might be useful. Look out for other cheat sheets for other products as well (coming soon) ! Operations How do I shut...
The release of vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.6 contained a new feature that may have flown under your radar, but I believe is a great addition to an already great product. Introducing Outbound Notifications! Introducing Outbound Notifications This new feature enables you to configure Lifecycle Manager to send...
So, first day back to work in the new year and I immediately have a problem in my home lab with vRA8. Simply put, it isn’t behaving. With some investigation I discovered that /var/log was full (100% utilised space on the volume). What to do? What to do?!?...
Recently I have been asked about my methods for creating dummy data, coding styles, coding habits, how to …. well, just about every aspect of how I like to code in vRO. In fact, how I like to code in vRO is how I like to code in...
Recently I have been helping a customer replace their self-signed Management Agent certificate in vRA7.6 with a new self-signed one (old one is expiring). To be clear this is the Management Agent certificate on the Iaas servers. VMware provide documentation on how to replace the certificate. But, to...
Something that I have had to do a lot of is working on subscription event based vRO workflows and ABX actions. The frustrating thing can be that you want to be able to develop in vRO using the vRA payload, without having to constantly ask vRA to create...
If you have reviewed some of my other posts here on automationpro.co.uk, you will know that I’m a fan of the ABX functionality in vRA8. Something that I have been wanting to accomplish for a while is sending an email from an ABX. There are some awesome posts...
The problem Today I wanted to kick off a ‘Product Inventory Sync’ of my global environment in Lifecycle Manager before performing some upgrades. But, after a few minutes it failed. The error message suggested that I check to see if the root password had expired. When I logged...
If you just want the script without the reading, download it here Integrating Ansible into vRA is a fantastic feature and not that hard to setup. VMware document the process themselves, and there are other numerous blog posts covering it as well, like this one or this one....
Recently I needed to create a connection to a Windows server and perform some operations on it. From there I wanted to run commands on the Windows server itself, and I didn’t want to have to worry about double hop WinRM issues from PowerShell. I wanted something flexible...
Whilst working with a customer to provide extensibility through ABX actions, I came across a documented issue that I wasn’t previously aware of. Whilst testing an ABX action I received the following error message: abx-service [host=’abx-service-app-5c578445f7-j2w6m’ thread=’parallel-47′ user=” org=” trace=” component=’GatewayActionProvider’ method=’convertExceptions:437′ actionRunI d=’8a7480a179b68ffb0179e552568b1e1a’ context=’87aad62e-0d90-4a61-b265-8b3720239a00′ tokenId=’8eb4435a-be1f-4921-9ca3-d809625dce4c’ parentTokenId=’8bdaa86c-1a01-4714-8c8f-9b1d41a5d98f’] c.v.a.a.p.i.g.Gate...