Automation – Page 173

Automating vRealize Automation 7 Minimal Install: Part 1 - vRA Appliance Deployment

02.05.2016 by William Lam // 6 Comments

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.

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.

New vSphere 6.0 API for configuring SMP-FT

02.04.2016 by William Lam // 1 Comment

Symmetric Multi-Processing Fault Tolerance (SMP-FT) is a new feature that was introduced in vSphere 6.0 which allows you to enable FT against a Virtual Machine with up to 4 vCPU. In addition to this new functionality, a new vSphere 6.0 API was also introduced to allow customers to easily manage this from an Automation standpoint. Previously, the CreateSecondaryVM_Task() vSphere API was used to enable Uni-Processing Fault Tolerance (UP-FT). With SMP-FT, there is a now a new vSphere API method called CreateSecondaryVMEx_Task() which supports a few additional parameters which is now required for enabling FT (UP-FT & SMP-FT) compared to the old "Legacy FT" mode.

Disclaimer: The example script is meant to be used for educational purposes. Please ensure proper testing is done if you decide to use it for Production environments.

I have created a small PowerCLI script called Set-FT.ps1 which exercises this new vSphere 6.0 API and below are examples on how to turn on or off SMP-FT for a VM:
Turning On SMP-FT

Set-FT -vmname "SMP-VM" -Operation on -Datastore "vsanDatastore" -Vmhost "vesxi60-5.primp-industries.com"

Turning off SMP-FT

Set-FT -vmname "SMP-VM" -Operation off -Datastore "vsanDatastore" -Vmhost "vesxi60-5.primp-industries.com"

Easily retrieve VM memory overhead using the vSphere 6.0 API

01.29.2016 by William Lam // 1 Comment

A handy API that was introduced in vSphere 6.0 is the ability to easily retrieve the amount of memory overhead for a given Virtual Machine. Though this was not a common task, it was not trivial to find and often required customers to scoure the various VM logs. In vSphere 6.0, we now have a module called the Overhead Memory Manager which provides a very simple API method called the LookupVmOverheadMemory() to retrieve this information. I know this question has come up from time to time and I figure I do a quick blog about it as I have not seen anyone write about this API yet.

I have created example implementation using PowerCLI to exercise this API which I have called Get-VMMemovehead.ps1 Once the method is loaded, you pipe the output of the Get-VM cmdlet to this new operation as seen in the screenshot below:

Get-VM "vcenter60-2" | Get-VMMemOverhead