In Part 3 of this blog series, we will now move onto configuring the vRA Appliance which includes setting up the VMware Identity Manager (Horizon SSO). There are two mandatory variables that you will need to edit prior to executing the configurevRA-Appliance.sh shell script. In addition, there are few optional variables that you can also configure which includes specifying a license key for vRA.

Once you have saved the changes to the script, you will need to run the script directly on the vRA Appliance. You can do so by uploading the script (SCP) to the vRA Appliance and then running it locally. If you prefer to run it remotely, you can leverage any existing SSH tools or if you prefer a Windows solution, something like plink or leveraging the vSphere Guest Operations API by using PowerCLI's Invoke-Guest cmdlet. By default, the script outputs all the verbose logging into /var/log/vra-appliance-configuration.log if you would like to get more details or perform some troubleshooting.

Here is an example of running the script locally on the vRA Appliance:

The script can take up to several minutes to configure and the high level steps are outputted to the screen console. Once the script has successfully completed, you can verify that everything is properly configured by logging into the Horizon SSO interface by opening a browser to the following URL: https://[VRA-APPLIANCE]/vcac which is also displayed in the output. You will login using "administrator" and the SSO password you had selected earlier. If you get a 404 when getting to the /vcac URL, you may just need to give it another 30 seconds and then refresh the page.

If you did not specify a vRA license, once logged in, you should see an "Invalid License" message. If you did specify a license, then you should see the vRA web interface as shown in the screenshot below. In case you get some strange errors after successfully logging in, you may need to wait a few minutes while the system finish initializing and then re-log back in.

In our fourth and final part of the blog series, we will tackle automating the the vRA IaaS Windows components from the vRA Appliance itself. This will include setting up the SSL certificates for both the Web/Manager Service and the installation of Web/Manager Service, Database, DEM Orchestrator, DEM Worker and vSphere Agent. Stay tuned!

• Automating vRealize Automation 7 Minimal Install: Part 1 - vRA Appliance Deployment
• Automating vRealize Automation 7 Minimal Install: Part 2 - vRA IaaS Agent Deployment
• Automating vRealize Automation 7 Minimal Install: Part 3 - vRA Appliance Configuration
• Automating vRealize Automation 7 Minimal Install: Part 4 - vRA IaaS Configuration

In Part 2 of this blog series, we will be looking at automating the installation of the vRA IaaS Management Agent which needs run on a Microsoft Windows system. The IaaS Management Agent installer is provided through the vRA Appliance which you can downloaded by opening a browser to the following URL:

https://[VRA_APPLIANCE_HOSTNAME]:5480/installer/download/vCAC-IaaSManagementAgent-Setup.msi

When installing the agent, you will need to provide information about the vRA Appliance that you wish to register the IaaS Management Agent with. The following Powershell script called installvRAIaaSAgent.ps1 will automatically download the vRA Iaas Management Agent from the vRA Appliance and then perform a silent installation. There are 5 mandatory variables that you will need to edit before running the script and the table below describes each of their functions:

Here is an example of running the script on my vRA IaaS Windows system:

In the final part of this series we will take a look at automating the configuration of both the vRA Appliance which includes Horizon SSO and the vRA IaaS Windows system which includes the various IaaS components.

• Automating vRealize Automation 7 Minimal Install: Part 1 - vRA Appliance Deployment
• Automating vRealize Automation 7 Minimal Install: Part 2 - vRA IaaS Agent Deployment
• Automating vRealize Automation 7 Minimal Install: Part 3 - vRA Appliance Configuration
• Automating vRealize Automation 7 Minimal Install: Part 4 - vRA IaaS Configuration

Over the last couple of weeks, I have received numerous requests about automating the deployment of the recently released vRealize Automation 7 (vRA) similar to what I did for vCloud Automation Center 6.0 when it was released. To be honest, I have not spent much time with vRealize Automation as you can see from my last post, it was dated back in 2013. I know there have been some significant improvements in the latest vRA release and perhaps it now officially supports silent or scripted installs like the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA).

I was a bit bummed to hear that this capability still had not made it into the product which would make streamlining proof of concept and Production deployments a breeze. I mean, why would you want to manually install it if you could automate, right? 🙂 I figure I reach out to one of my vRA Engineering buddies Kim Delgado to see if anything had already been done in this area. She was nice enough to share a couple of resources which cover certain parts of the deployment but nothing that was tying everything together.

I figure I would see what I could re-purpose and try to put together a few simple scripts that would allow anyone to easily stand up a minimal vRA 7 deployment for testing and POC purposes. I normally like prove everything out before publishing but in this case, I figure I would just go with the flow. So far, I have broken down the automation into the following three sections listed below. I have successfully completed Part 1 and Part 2 and I have not attempted Part 3 and Part 4, so I do not know it it will be possible or what issues I might run into.

• Automating vRealize Automation 7 Minimal Install: Part 1 - vRA Appliance Deployment
• Automating vRealize Automation 7 Minimal Install: Part 2 - vRA IaaS Agent Deployment
• Automating vRealize Automation 7 Minimal Install: Part 3 - vRA Appliance Configuration
• Automating vRealize Automation 7 Minimal Install: Part 4 - vRA IaaS Configuration

Note: You can deploy vRA 7 in either a minimal setup which has just the vRA appliance and vRA IaaS system running or in a fully distributed model which they are calling Enterprise. In the series, I will only be covering the minimal deployment. For those interested in a distributed deployment, hopefully you will be able to build upon the scripts that I have created and should be a fun learning exercise for those looking to do more automation.

In part 1 of this series, I will be covering the deployment of the vRA 7 Appliance and have created the following PowerCLI deployment.ps1 script. There are several properties you will need to fill out such as the networking configuration, OS credentials, etc. before you can run the script. Once the script completes, you can verify that the deployment was successful by opening a browser to VAMI interface of the vRA Appliance using the following URL: https://[VRA-HOSTNAME]:5480

Stay tuned for Part 2 next week where I will be covering how to automate the installation of the vRA IaaS Management Agent.