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Automated Aria Suite (Lifecycle, Identity, Operations, Logs & Automation) Lab Deployment Script

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I recently got reacquainted with the Aria Suite Lifecycle Manager (ASLCM) solution, which makes it super easy for anyone to manage the deployment, configuration and lifecycle for the complete Aria suite of products including Aria Identity, Aria Operations, Aria Operations for Logs and Aria Automation.

Users can deploy the various Aria products in either standalone or clustered mode (for high availability purposes), with the former being ideal for learning and homelab purposes. In addition to deploying ASLCM and the individual Aria products, I wanted to also use this as an opportunity explore the ASLCM REST API and what better way to learn than to have a use case to get hands on experience.

While ASLCM already provides a simple way to deploy Aria products using the UI and includes a nice export/import feature for an environment configuration in JSON, I wanted to do the same, but programmatically using the ASLCM REST API to fully configure the environment.

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Automate the deployment & initial configuration of Aria Suite Lifecycle Manager (formally vRSLCM) 

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I love writing automation, especially for deploying a consistent and repeatable environment for testing or learning purposes. I recently deployed the latest Aria Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.14 (formally vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager or vRSLCM) manually using the graphical Easy Installer method, which was easy and straight forward.

Unlike the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) installer, which includes both a UI and CLI option, the latter for automation purposes. I found that ASLCM only provides an interactive UI method for deployment and I was interested in an automated solution. Similar to the VCSA installer, the extracted contents of the ASLCM ISO is the installer and OVA image, so I figured I could just deploy using PowerCLI and I could start playing with ASLCM!

Automating the ASLCM OVA deployment was trivial, but what I discovered was that there was different behavior between using the Easy Installer versus just deploying the OVA and powering it on. I observed that I was not able to login using the password that I had set in the OVF properties for the admin@local user ...

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Automated VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Workload Domain deployment using PowerVCF

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Using my Automated VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Lab Deployment script, you can quickly get to a functional VCF Management Domain which includes deploying the required Nested ESXi VMs and the Cloud Builder appliance, end-to-end automated deployment .


After recently enhancing the script to support the latest VCF 5.1 release and enabling users to also specify the Nested ESXi VMs that can be used to setup a VCF Workload Domain, I wanted to take it one step further and also automate the VCF Workload Domain deployment and utilizing the infrastructure that was setup in the initial deployment script.

Previously, if you wanted to create a Workload Domain, you would need to deploy the required Nested ESXi VMs, commission the ESXi hosts into SDDC Manager and then either use the Workload Domain creation wizard in SDDC Manager or manually construct the required JSON configuration file for an automated installation.

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