So I started to take notes myself but found that Bill Gurling’s notes were way better (@vdingus on Twitter) – I’m publishing them here with his permission (call me his hype man).
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Hartman Schoebel
Shannon Wilber
VMware
Process
- Ask the customer what they want?
- Maybe not – customers don’t know what they don’t know. “Henry Ford’s faster horse”
- IaaS Lifecycle Whiteboard Workshop
- Overlays vCAC functionality on the customers process and environment
- Easily identifies areas of synergy and divergence
- Provides the customer with full understanding of vCAC
- Provides VMware with holistic view of the customers needs
- Workflow:
- Request
- Placement
- Approval
- Provision
- Post Provision
- Management
- Decomission
- Admin’s Processes First
- Focus on automating for the IT admins
- Simplify the provisioning and repetitive interactions with VMs
- import and manage existing VMs
Architecture
- Use the VMware vRealize Automation published reference architecture
- Small / Medium, does it matter?
- Small if not HA or Load Balanced
- Small / Medium, does it matter?
- Considerations
- Load Balancers
- F5 is common, lots of documentation and reference materials
- Scale
- High Availability
- lots of complexity, leg a / leg b
- Load Balancers
- Managing vRA
- Combine with vRealize Ops and vRA Management Pack
- Log insight content pack for vRA and turn into events for vRO
Setup and Hardening
- Base / Small Architecture (from the reference architecture)
- 2 Appliances not including DB
- up to 4000 VMs / 100 catalogue items
- Can add vRealize business as well as app services
Backup
- Backup and Recovery w/ 6.x
- Required Components
- SQL Database for IaaS
- PostgreSQL Database
- Identity Appliance (SSO)
- vRealize Automation Appliances
- Optional – Load Balance
- Minimize the # of active transactions before you begin the backup and backup all databases at the same time for the most consistent DB backups
- Internal Installations of PostgreSQL database are not automatically backed up as part of the IaaS backup. You must back the PostgreSQL database up separately.
- If using snaps, must bring down the appliances prior to snaps to get app consistent snaps
- Set up PostgreSQL replication if possible, important to this architecture
- Required Components
Upgrade / Migration
- Potential for upgrade assessment due to dependencies and complexity of vRA upgrades
- 5.2 => 6.2
- Requires a migration rather than an in place upgrade due to complexity and significant changes
- Upgrades from versions prior to 5.2.3 will first need to go to 5.2.3 as a prereq for migrating to the newly created 6.2 environment
- It is expected and acceptable that there will be some manual reconfiguration required pre and post upgrade
- 6.1 => 6.2
- minimal downtime
- in place upgrade
- Planning
- Identify tenants, managed machines, blueprints, provisioning groups, enterprise groups, business groups, fabric groups, reservations and end points and validate dependencies, especially plugins.
- Identify a migration plan for how the customer will migrate data
- Upgrading to 6.1
- Supported upgrade versions
- vRA 6.0.1
- vRA 6.0.1.1
- vRA6.0.1.2
- Supported upgrade versions
Integrations
- NSX
- CMDB
- IPAM – Infoblox most common
- Storage
- Configuration Mangement – Puppet / Chef / Salt / Ansible
Configuration of a Provisioning Infrastructure
- Configuration Steps
- Add a tenant
- Configure endpoints
- Create fabric groups
- An IaaS administrator can organize virtualization compute resources and cloud endpoints into fabric groups by type and intent. One or more fabric administrators manage the resources in each fabric group.
- Fabric administrators are responsible for creating reservations on the compute resources in their groups to allocate fabric to specific business groups. Fabric groups are created in a specific tenant, but their resources can be made available to users who belong to business groups in all tenants.
- Create business groups
- Create reservations
- Create blueprints
- Add blueprints to service catalogue
- Entitle users
- Often many cooks in the kitchen
- Architect / Consultant looking at current technology and operations workflows, potentially conducting full fledged assessments
- Implementation engineers for vRA, vRO, vRB including necessary customizations and orchestration workflows
- Engineers assisting with integrations for post provisioning platforms
- Ongoing management and maintenance of the environment
Troubleshooting
No troubleshooting…ran out of time.
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