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

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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

automating-vrealize-automation-7-appliance
Stay tuned for Part 2 next week where I will be covering how to automate the installation of the vRA IaaS Management Agent.

Cloud Native Apps, Containers & Docker sessions at VMworld

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I just saw a nice list of VMworld sessions that was shared internally by Ben Corrie, an Engineer working in our Cloud Native Apps team at VMware on some of the VMworld sessions related to Cloud Native Apps, Containers & Docker. I figure I would share his list with a wider audience for those interested and I have also included session proposals by both VMware Employees as well as from our partners which you can find below.

I am personally excited for session 5229 - Docker and Fargo: Exploding the Linux Container Host which will be presented by both Ben & George Hicken if it gets accepted. I was fortunate enough to catch a demo of this internal project at our R&D Innovation Offsite (RADIO) last week and I think folks will be blown away with some of the work that has been done in this area. I can not say anymore other than to vote for this session and any others that you might be interested in! If there are other sessions, please let me know and I will update the list.

I had to also thrown in a shameless plug at the very bottom of this post on three of the sessions that I have submitted for VMworld this year. Hope you find them interesting to vote for and hope to see you all at VMworld!

VMware Submitted Sessions (14)

Session # Session Title
4590 Hypervisors vs. Containers - Wait That's the Wrong Question!
4600 An Interesting Application Software Based on Docker
4725 Scalable On-Demand Cloud Native Apps with Docker and Mesos
4767 Seven Things vSphere Admins Need to Know About Photon Lightwave and Containers
4853 Docker Containers on vSphere: Performance Deep Dive
4940 CIS Benchmark Compliance for Docker - Automated with VMware
5006 Monitoring Software Containers with vRealize Operations
5121 Containers as a Service with vRealize Automation and VMware Project Photon
5229 Docker and Fargo: Exploding the Linux Container Host
5266 Docker in the Real World: Tales Round the Campfire
5343 Rapid and Continuous Delivery Through Docker Container and VMware Cloud Technologies
5409 Migration of Docker Based Applications across Clouds
5627 How Do You Manage and Monetize the Docker Deployments as Containers Not VMs to Groups in Your Organization Using Your Existing vRealize Suite?
5860 Containers without Compromise: Providing Persistent Storage for Docker Containers using vSphere

Partner Submitted Sessions (8)

Session # Session Title
4742 Understanding Databases for Distributed Containerized Applications
5078 Back to the Future: What Current Container Trends Mean for the Future of Application Deployment
5321 Building Container Infrastructure for Enterprise Applications with Docker VMware Photon and vSphere
5494 TOSCA: Containers Microservices OpenStack and Orchestrating the Whole Symphony
5520 Containers on VMware Infrastructure
5907 Taming Containerized Workloads with Photon and Tectonic
6081 Are You Prepared to Contain the Container? Understand the Security and Compliance Considerations for Application Containers
6126 Containers VMs and Microservices Walk into a Bar.....

William Lam Submitted Sessions (3)

Session # Session Title
4528 vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) Best Practices & Tips/Tricks
5106 Content Library
5278 VC Windows to VCSA Migration Fling Deep Dive

How to customize the login UI for vRealize {Operations Manager, Log Insight, Automation}?

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With so much excitement and positive feedback (internal/external) regarding my article on customizing the login UI for the new vSphere 6.0 Web Client, I knew it was only a matter of time before folks started asking about customizing other VMware login UIs. As I have mentioned already, going beyond just the aesthetics such as adding an organizations logo or colors, it is often a mandatory requirement for many organizations to display a security or warning banner to users prior to logging in. I was recently added into an internal Socialcast thread asking whether it would be possible to do the same for vRealize Operations Manager (vROps).

I figure I take a quick look to see if this was possible and what it might take. I wanted to also take this opportunity and share a few other solutions that other VMware folks have found in terms of customizing the login UIs for both vRealize Log Insight (thanks GSS Engineer Alan Castonguay for sharing the details) and vRealize Automation (thanks to Justin Jones for his awesome tool). You can find all the details below as well as some additional tidbits through my exploration.

Something that can be helpful in the future as more products integrate with vCenter's SSO (PSC in vSphere 6.0) is that you only need to customize the login page once and it will be available to all other solutions.

UPDATE (03/03/2025) - Customizations for Aria Operations 8.18.x is still applicable, but the login.jsp will need to be updated. (Thanks to Brock Peterson for confirming)

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware. Please make sure to perform a backup of all original files prior to editing in case you need to restore the system defaults.

vROps (vRealize Operations Manager)

Here are the two locations if you wish to customize the login UI for vROps 6.0. The first is the login.jsp file that controls the login UI. If you wish to simply replace the entire image, it will require some tweaking as the login UI is actually composed of several graphical elements making this task a bit more difficult. The second is the images directory which you will want to upload any content you wish to use for the login UI.

Note: Please make sure to perform a backup of all original files prior to editing in case you need to restore the system defaults.

  • /usr/lib/vmware-vcops/tomcat-web-app/webapps/vcops-web-ent/pages/login.jsp
  • /usr/lib/vmware-vcops/tomcat-web-app/webapps/vcops-web-ent/images

Due to the various tweaks, I have created a sample login.jsp which you can download and reference here. This will allow you to replace the entire background for the vROps login UI as well as adding in some text that you wish to display. I know how big of a fan Rawlinson Rivera is of Justin Bieber, so I thought I use his favorite background for creating what an a custom vROps login UI can potentially look like.

customize-vrealize-operations-manager-login-ui

vRLI (vRealize Log Insight)

Here are the two locations if you wish to customize the login UI for vRLI 2.5. The first is the main login background image which is a 600x410 image if you wish to stick with the default layout. The second is a 300x78 transparent image for the vRLI logo, you can either keep this or replace it with your own.

Note: Please make sure to perform a backup of all original files prior to editing in case you need to restore the system defaults.

  • /usr/lib/loginsight/application/3rd_party/apache-tomcat-6.0.36/webapps/ROOT/images/misc/login-bg.png
  • /usr/lib/loginsight/application/3rd_party/apache-tomcat-6.0.36/webapps/ROOT/images/logo/vmware-logo-big-white-v2.png

If you wish to add additional text to the login page, you can edit the following file which controls the login UI.

  • /usr/lib/loginsight/application/3rd_party/apache-tomcat-6.0.36/webapps/ROOT/loginsight/login/login.css

Here is a quick example by inserting the following above Line 20:

<div style="color:#ffffff;text-align:center;font-size:20px">Punching Cloud Edition</div>

Here is an example of what custom login UI for vRLI could potentially look like:

customize-vrealize-log-insight-login-ui

vRA (vRealize Automation)

As a bonus, if you are interested in customizing the Login UI for vRA, be sure to check out fellow Automation colleague Justin Jones who has built this really cool utility called vRA Brand Customizer to help with customizing vRA login UI for the various tenants in your environment. I would recommend keeping an eye on this tool for some really cool stuff coming in the future 😉