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...
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...
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...
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...
Having installed Puppet Enterprise in my home lab I decided I should hook it up to my vRA 8.3 installation using the native integration feature. Doing a quick Google search yielded a clear and simple blog post that outlined how to configure it for vRA 8.1. Following this...
Recently I have been having some fun and games with vRA 8.2, in particular, with the extensibility capabilities. With the introduction of PowerShell support for vRA actions, I thought I would have a little play and see what I could break. I’m On A MetaData Hunt.. Ok, so...
After deploying the NSX-T manager in my lab (I have a project coming up which will require me to automate some of the NSX-T configuration) I found that appliance had not installed properly. The services were not started correctly, no web UI and errors in the console about...
Of late I have been playing with Terraform and the vRA 8 provider. Although I have found quite a few bugs with the provider (I’ll log those soon) it certainly is a great start! I have captured a quick demo below where I configure settings on a brand...
Attached to this post you will find a JSON file that can be imported into Postman. The import will give you a collection called ‘AutomationPro-vRA8’ which contains 19 example requests for using against a VMware vRA 8 install. Although there are many more requests that can be made,...
I thought I would share two videos [editor: very basic, excuse the quality!] showing the use of Terraform to manipulate vSphere infrastructure. I recommend watching both videos ‘full screen’ for best effect [editor: and with popcorn if you have any, preferably sweet] Video1 – vSphere Infrastructure...
Summary This tutorial will show you how to apply one or more licenses to vCenter through the use of Terraform. This can be expanded on to create a module that can be used across multiple vSphere environments. Structure First of all, we are going to create a...