vRA 7

Automating vRealize Automation 7 Minimal Install: Part 4 - vRA IaaS Configuration

02.17.2016 by William Lam // 14 Comments

If you have been following the blog series thus far, we have covered deploying the vRA 7 Virtual Appliance, installing the vRA IaaS Management Agent on a Microsoft Windows system which will run the various IaaS components and then finally configuring the vRA Virtual Appliance which includes setting up the VMware Identity Manager (Horizon SSO). Before proceeding to the vRA IaaS installation, you will need to make sure that you have completed all three of steps above.

In addition, there are some other prerequisites (more details here) that are required on the Microsoft Windows system in which you plan to install the vRA IaaS components, namely an instance of Microsoft SQL Server running and various Windows configuration tweaks required by the installers. I will not be covering the installation of the DB, so this will be something you will need to either manually install or automate using a silent installer for SQL Server. For the pre-checks, although this is also not covered in the script, I will show you how you can run the same tool on the Windows system like you would using the new vRA 7 Guided Wizard. The tool will identify any configuration issues found and then also allow you to easily remediate them within the tool, which is an awesome feature in my opinion.

You can find the vRA IaaS Pre-req Checker tool on the vRA Appliance under the following path:

/opt/vmware/share/htdocs/service/iaas/download/PrereqChecker.zip

You will then need to SCP the PrereqChecker.zip file onto your Windows system that you plan to run the vRA IaaS components. Next, extract the contents of the zip and launch the PrereqChecker.exe. Before clicking on the "Run Checker" button, make sure you have enabled the IIS role, else the tool can not run all prechecks. The instructions are located to the right of the screen and once that has been completed, you can then run the precheck tool. For any issues that have been identified, you can remediate by clicking on the "Fix Issue" button. Once all prechecks have passed, you can then move onto the vRA IaaS installation.

Note: I was a bit surprised to see that the PrereqChecker.zip could not be downloaded directly from the vRA Appliance like the other installers by simply opening a browser to the following URL:

https://[VRA-HOSTNAME]:5480/installer/PrereqChecker.zip

It turns out there an index.py script which defines which files can be downloaded without authentication. If you wish to change this behavior, you can run the following snippet on the vRA Appliance and then you can download the zip file directly from the browser which can be useful from an automation standpoint.

sed -i "s/'DBUpgrade.zip'/'DBUpgrade.zip','PrereqChecker.zip'/g" /opt/vmware/share/htdocs/service/iaas/index.py

If you have made it to this point, we are now ready to get our automation on! We will be installing the following vRA IaaS components which are listed below onto the Windows system which has the vRA IaaS Management Agent running.

SSL Certificate for Web and Manager Service
Database
Web API (WAPI) Service
Manager Service
DEM Orchestrator
DEM Worker
vSphere Agent

The automation will be completely driven from within the vRA Virtual Appliance using the configurevRA-IaaS.sh shell script. This is possible because we had deployed the vRA IaaS Management Agent earlier which will act as a proxy for all component installations. There are 9 variables that you will need to edit prior to running the script and you can find their descriptions below.

Variable	Description
HORIZON_SSO_PASSWORD	SSO Password that you had configured earlier
VRA_IAAS_HOSTNAME	Hostname of the Windows system running vRA IaaS Components
VRA_IAAS_USERNAME	Username for the Windows system
VRA_IAAS_PASSWORD	Password for the Windows system (e.g. vra-iaas\administrator)
VRA_DATABASE_HOSTNAME	Hostname of the Windows system running SQL Server (should be same as vRA IaaS system)
VRA_DATABASE_NAME	Database name
VRA_DATABASE_USERNAME	Database username (assumes Windows Auth)
VRA_DATABASE_PASSWORD	Database password (assumes Windows Auth)
VRA_DATABASE_SECURITY_PASSPHRASE	Security passphrase

Once you have saved your changes, you can then run the script on the vRA Appliance as shown in the screenshot below. All verbose output is stored in /var/log/vra-iaas-configuration.log and you will be able to see the high level operations displayed in the console. The entire process can take anywhere from 10-20 minutes depending on your environment and what you will looking for are the "INSTALLED SUCCESSFULLY" messages which I have highlighted in green below. If you have met all prereqs, you should not run into any issues but if you do, the script will output the specific errors from each of the installers.

Once the script has completed, you will now have a fully functional vRA 7 deployment which includes both the vRA Appliance as well as the vRA IaaS components! I would also like to give a big thanks to both Kim Delgado for connecting me with some of the vRA Engineering folks as well as a huge thanks to Dora L. from the vRA Engineering for assisting me with parts of the IaaS installation.

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

02.16.2016 by William Lam // 3 Comments

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:

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.

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.

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!

Automating vRealize Automation 7 Minimal Install: Part 2 - vRA IaaS Agent Deployment

02.08.2016 by William Lam // 2 Comments

In Part 2 of this blog series, we will be looking at automating the installation of the vRA IaaS Management Agent which needs run on a Microsoft Windows system. The IaaS Management Agent installer is provided through the vRA Appliance which you can downloaded by opening a browser to the following URL:

https://[VRA_APPLIANCE_HOSTNAME]:5480/installer/download/vCAC-IaaSManagementAgent-Setup.msi

When installing the agent, you will need to provide information about the vRA Appliance that you wish to register the IaaS Management Agent with. The following Powershell script called installvRAIaaSAgent.ps1 will automatically download the vRA Iaas Management Agent from the vRA Appliance and then perform a silent installation. There are 5 mandatory variables that you will need to edit before running the script and the table below describes each of their functions:

Variable	Description
VRA_APPLIANCE_HOSTNAME	Hostname or IP of vRA Appliance
VRA_APPLIANCE_USERNAME	Username of vRA Appliance (default: root)
VRA_APPLIANCE_PASSWORD	Password of vRA Appliance
VRA_APPLIANCE_AGENT_DOWNLOAD_PATH	Path to store vRA Agent (optional)
VRA_APPLIANCE_AGENT_INSTALL_LOG	Path to store vRA Agent install logs (optional)
VRA_IAAS_SERVICE_USERNAME	OS username to the vRA IaaS Windows System
VRA_IAAS_SERVICE_PASSWORD	OS password to the vRA IaaS Windows System

Here is an example of running the script on my vRA IaaS Windows system:

In the final part of this series we will take a look at automating the configuration of both the vRA Appliance which includes Horizon SSO and the vRA IaaS Windows system which includes the various IaaS components.