WilliamLam.com

Automating vRealize stack based on VVD using new vRealize Suite Lifecycle Management

by // 1 Comment

Our Cloud Management Business Unit (CMBU) at VMware just GA'ed the highly anticipated vRealize Suite Lifecycle Management or vRSLCM for short. As the name suggests, this new solution provides customers a simple and consistent mechanism for managing the entire lifecycle management (Day 0 to Day N) for all VMware vRealize Products including but not limited to Install, Upgrade, Configuration Management, Drift Remediation and Health Monitoring. vRSLCM is delivered as a Virtual Appliance which can be used in either a greenfield and/or existing brownfield environment. You can also manage multiple environments that consists of different vRealize products that have been deployed giving customers 100% visibility into all their different vRealize environments using a single interface. For more information, be sure to check out this blog post here.


One specific feature that I think is worth calling out and not because our team was involved with it is the ability to deploy what vRSLCM calls "Solutions". These Solutions not only correspond to the specific vRealize products being deployed but they also align to the three VMware Validated Design 4.1 Use Cases: IT Automating IT, Micro-Segmentation and Intelligent Operations as shown in the screenshot below.


This means for customers who wish to deploy the vRealize stack based on the VMware Validated Designs can now easily do so by simply selecting one of these solutions and providing their environment specific information such as DNS, NTP, etc. and vRSLCM will deploy and configure the vRealize products as prescribed in the VVD. Customers no longer have to manually read through pages and pages of documentation to get the desired outcome. [Read more...]

Quick Tip - Connect-OMServer throws The request was aborted: Could not create SSL/TLS secure channel.

by // 3 Comments

While doing some work with PowerCLI and vRealize Operations Manager (vROps), I ran into the following error message when trying to connect to my vROps instance using PowerCLI:

Connect-OMServer : 2/17/2017 5:27:50 AM Connect-OMServer The request was aborted: Could not create SSL/TLS secure channel.
At line:1 char:1
+ Connect-OMServer -Server vrops.primp-industries.com -User admin -Password VMware ...
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (VMware.VimAutom...tionServiceImpl:OMConnectionServiceImpl) [Connect-OMServer], OMException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : OM_ConnectivityServiceImpl_ConnectOMServer_ByUserNameAndPassword_ConnectError,VMware.VimAutomation.vROps.Commands.Cmdlets.ConnectOMServer

Although there were some hits on Google, none of the suggestions has worked. I had also found that this issue was only happening in one of my lab environments which was running Windows 2008 R2, for my other system which had Windows 8.1, the issue was not observed.

I had reached out to the PowerCLI Engineering team and it looks like the issue is due to a change in the hashing algorithm (SHA512) that vROps uses for its SSL Certificates. When using TLS 1.2, SHA512 is not supported by default. The fix is to simply install the following patch here which will resolve the problem.

Extracting VIN (vSphere Infrastructure Navigator) information using PowerCLI & vROps REST API

by // 2 Comments

A request that I continue to receive from customers on a fairly regular basis is a way to extract the virtual machine application services and dependencies that is provided by vSphere Infrastructure Navigator (VIN) solution. Below is an example of what a VIN discovery might look like and in this case, it is actually mapping out the application and dependencies of itself.


Today, there is not a public API for VIN and although I have published several methods here, here and here on how to extract the information from VIN, the experience is still not very user friendly or easy to do.

Last week, while talking to a fellow colleague who works in our VMware Validated Design team, I found out that VIN actually has a vRealize Operations Manager (vROps) Management Pack and could potentially be useful in helping us retrieve the information generated by VIN.


Not having spent much time with vROps Management Packs, I understood at a high level they provided custom dashboards for vROps, but I was not sure if the data provided by the management packs could also be retrieved programmatically? It has also been some time since I have looked at the vROps REST API and specifically the "public" REST API which allows customers to retrieve the metrics collected from within vROps.

[Read more...]