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Automating vRealize Automation 7 Minimal Install: Part 3 - vRA Appliance Configuration

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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.

Variable Description Required
HORIZON_SSO_PASSWORD SSO Password Yes
NTP_SERVER NTP Server Yes
VRA_LICENSE_KEY vRA license key No
VRA_SSL_CERT_COUNTRY SSL cert No
VRA_SSL_CERT_STATE SSL cert State No
VRA_SSL_CERT_ORG SSL cert Org No
VRA_SSL_CERT_ORG_UNIT SSL cert OU No

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:

automate-vra7-appliance-configuration-3
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.

automate-vra7-appliance-configuration-0
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.

automate-vra7-appliance-configuration-2
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!

VMware Tools for Nested ESXi updated to v1.2

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I just wanted to give everyone a heads up that we have a minor update to the VMware Tools for Nested ESXi Fling (esx-tools-for-esxi-9.7.2-0.0.5911061.i386.vib) and you can find the list of changes below.

What's new in version 1.2:

  • Larger resource pool for programs started using the VIX/Guest Operations API (resolves this issue)
  • Now supports Guest Time Synchronization
  • No longer require -f flag to install the VIB

If you have any feedback, feel free to leave a comment here or on the Flings page.

Quick Tip - Determining the vCenter Server OS platform (Windows or VCSA) using vSphere API

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The vSphere API is an extensively rich interface for being able to extract all sorts of useful information about your vSphere infrastructure. One useful trick that may come in handy for those requiring to perform operations directly against the vCenter Server guestOS itself is to figure out whether you are connecting to a Windows vCenter Server or the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA)? Lets say you wish to automate the deployment of the recently released VSAN 6.0 Health Check Plugin and the process to install the plugin will differ between Windows vCenter Server and the VCSA, so it would be ideal if you can easily distinguish between the two

A simplistic solution would be to quickly test for something that would exist in either Windows or Linux, but what if you wanted to perform these operations using the vSphere API and the Guest Operations API to execute the commands within the guests? Well, luckily the vSphere API actually provides this information when connecting to a vCenter Server API endpoint and you can tell if you are connecting to a Windows vCenter Server or the VCSA.

To determine the guestOS type for the vCenter Server you are connecting to, there is a property called osType which you can query when you first connect. Below is a quick PowerCLI snippet for accessing this property, you can also use a variety of other vSphere SDKs to extract this property.

$server = Connect-VIServer -Server reflex.primp-industries.com

$server.ExtensionData.Content.About

Disconnect-VIServer -Server $server -Confirm:$false

The osType property for the VCSA is linux-x64

vcenter-server-os-platform-0
The osType property for vCenter Server for Windows is win32-x64

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