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Configuring Standalone vRealize Orchestrator with VMware Cloud on AWS

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vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) is powerful workflow engine that many of our customers have been using to automate across a number of different VMware and 3rd party solutions. It is also a foundational component to vRealize Automation (vRA) and it enables our customers to build end-to-end IT and Developer workflows across different Clouds: Private, Public and Hybrid.

It should come as no surprise that existing vRO/vRA customers would like to take advantage of VMware Cloud on AWS and be able to add its vCenter Server instance to vRO for Automation purposes. A few weeks back, I had heard mixed results from our field and customers when attempting to add VMware Cloud on AWS vCenter Server endpoint to vRO. I was actually working with another customer on a related topic and I decided I give this a try in my lab, which was running the standalone vRO 7.5 Appliance.

I did indeed run into a problem when attempting to add vCenter Server as an endpoint in vRO. It turns out this was due to a bug with the vSphere vRO Plugin which has since been resolved with the latest vRO 7.6 release. In any case, there is a simple workaround for customers that are currently not running the latest vRO appliance and you can find the instructions below.

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Automated ESXi Installation to USB using Kickstart

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I frequently re-install ESXi on my physical host for various types of testing as I normally work with a number of future releases. Although the process just takes a couple of minutes, having to enter the exact same information each time and also requiring a keyboard and monitor is not really ideal. For the majority, this is really not a problem and manually going through the install workflow is fine for most folks, especially as this is an infrequent operation.

However, with some recent customer conversations, I thought it was worth while to re-visit this topic and demonstrating just how easy it is to automate the installation of ESXi with just a single bootable USB device and embedding an ESXi Kickstart Script. Even for infrequent installation and/or upgrades of ESXi for home labs, this can be a time saver, especially if you do not have monitor and keyboard just lying around. Below are instructions including a reference Kickstart example that folks can use as a starting point. For more advanced automation, please take a look at my ESXi Kickstart Resources as well as the official VMware documentation for ESXi Scripted Installations.

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Automating HCX Multi-Site Service Mesh configuration using the new HCX PowerCLI cmdlets

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With the latest Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) R121 release, the new HCX Multi-Site Service Mesh configuration option is now the default and preferred method for setting up HCX. In fact, the legacy "HCX Components" method, which is focused on deploying individual HCX Appliances has been deprecated in the latest release and will be removed in the future, in favor of the new simplified deployment option.


As many of you know, I have been doing quite a bit of HCX Automation with VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) and with the recent PowerCLI 11.3 release which now includes new HCX Multi-Site Service Mesh (MSSM) cmdlets, I figured this would be a good time to update my automation to take advantage of the new HCX MSSM feature.

While trying out the new MSSM cmdlets, I ran into a couple of issues which took me awhile to figure out. The issue stems from the fact that you can not simply create some of the MSSM objects such as a Network or Compute Profile and then save the output to a variable for use with other CSSM cmdlets, which I found to be quite strange as that is one of the biggest benefit of PowerShell and being able to pipe objects between cmdlets. You have to perform a "GET" operation on the object that you had just created because the types returned are different between the New and Get cmdlets. In any case, here is a sample end-to-end workflow using the new MSSM cmdlets as I figured others may run into this problem scratching their head and the PowerCLI documentation was not very clear about this behavior, at least it was not apparent to me.

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