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Automating VMware ITBM (IT Business Management) configuration

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Over the years I have had the privilege to install the majority of VMware products in either my production environment when I was a customer or in my personal home lab for testing. While in the process of learning about the vCloud Automation Center 6.0 to automate the installation and configuration, I came across a VMware product that I was not very familiar with called VMware ITBM (IT Business Management Suite). ITBM integrates with vCloud Automation Center and provides your business with insights into various cost analysis and metrics for both your public and private clouds.

VMware ITBM is provided as a Virtual Appliance and given that it integrates with vCloud Automation Center which I just been deployed in my home lab, I thought I take a look to see how one could automate the initial configuration setup. After manually deploying ITBM, I found the setup through the VAMI to be pretty straight forward and one could easily automate this. There is a command-line utility called /usr/sbin/itfm-config that we will be using to register our ITBM instance to vCloud Automation Center. To help simplify the setup, I have created a simple shell script called configureITBM.sh that will automatically configure ITBM given three simple variable input:

  • VCAC_VA_SERVER - Hostname/IP of your vCAC VA Server
  • VCAC_SSO_PASSWORD - The SSO password
  • TIMEZONE  - Timezone

Here is a screenshot of executing the script on the ITBM Virtual Appliance:

To verify that the configuration was successful, we can login to the VAMI interface of ITBM by opening a browser to the hostname/IP Address:5480 and we should see under the Status section we are now connected to our vCloud Automation Center Server.

Once we have confirmed that ITBM has been successfully configured we can now head over to our vCloud Automation Center Server and we should see a new tab called Business Management.

As mentioned earlier, I have not used the ITBM product before but I do recall a demo that was given during an Alpha of vCloud Automation Center 6.0 and I was quite impressed with the amount of information and customization this tool provides for cost and operational analysis.