Automating vRealize stack based on VVD using new vRealize Suite Lifecycle Management

Our Cloud Management Business Unit (CMBU) at VMware just GA'ed the highly anticipated vRealize Suite Lifecycle Management or vRSLCM for short. As the name suggests, this new solution provides customers a simple and consistent mechanism for managing the entire lifecycle management (Day 0 to Day N) for all VMware vRealize Products including but not limited to Install, Upgrade, Configuration Management, Drift Remediation and Health Monitoring. vRSLCM is delivered as a Virtual Appliance which can be used in either a greenfield and/or existing brownfield environment. You can also manage multiple environments that consists of different vRealize products that have been deployed giving customers 100% visibility into all their different vRealize environments using a single interface. For more information, be sure to check out this blog post here.

One specific feature that I think is worth calling out and not because our team was involved with it is the ability to deploy what vRSLCM calls "Solutions". These Solutions not only correspond to the specific vRealize products being deployed but they also align to the three VMware Validated Design 4.1 Use Cases: IT Automating IT, Micro-Segmentation and Intelligent Operations as shown in the screenshot below.

This means for customers who wish to deploy the vRealize stack based on the VMware Validated Designs can now easily do so by simply selecting one of these solutions and providing their environment specific information such as DNS, NTP, etc. and vRSLCM will deploy and configure the vRealize products as prescribed in the VVD. Customers no longer have to manually read through pages and pages of documentation to get the desired outcome.

Another really slick feature of the vRSLCM Solution deployment is the ability to deploy using either the vRSLCM UI or using a JSON configuration file. The added benefit in addition to enabling Automation at scale is that you can easily source control your entire vRealize deployment and store them in your CMDB or even Github for example. At any given point, you know what your golden configuration should be and if you wish to expand a given deployment, it is as easy as adding in another node with the respective configuration and vRSLCM will then re-configure the environment to meet the desired state.

Here are some JSON examples that are included in the latest VVD 4.1 documentation that can be adjusted and used in your own environment:

• IT Automating IT JSON Sample
• Micro-Segmentation JSON Sample
• Intelligent Operations JSON Sample

To take advantage of the new VVD Use Cases using vRSLCM, you will need to ensure you have deployed the VVD Foundation which consists of vSphere, vSAN and NSX. This is only mandatory if you wish to have a fully compliment VVD deployment. There are also set of pre-requisites that you will need to go through including the deployment of the vRSLCM Virtual Appliance and lastly, some post-deployment steps as not every single VVD configuration is currently captured within vRSLCM, more information can be found in the documentation here. I know the vRSLCM team would like to get to 100% parity and I think customers would agree with that as well. If you have any feedback, comments or feature requests regarding vRSLCM, feel free to leave a comment and I will be sure to forward that off to the vRSLCM Product Manager.

Here are a few additional useful links to quickly get started:

• vRSLCM Release Notes
• vRSLCM Download