Why use vRA?

• Increase Business Agility
• Improve efficiency
• Fast time to cloud value
• Consumerization of IT

What does it do?

• It allows IT departments to accelerate the delivery and ongoing management of custom virtual machines, applications and business relevant infrastructure to improve efficiency and streamline processes. This can sometimes take weeks or months.
• Policy based governance and application modelling ensures IT services are delivered with the correct service levels and configuration.
• Life-cycle management allows the control of services from start to end, maintaining operational efficiency. Release automation also allows multi tier application deployments to be maintained in sync with company policies and processes.
• Using a unified IT self-service catalog, business users can request and manage a large range of custom services.\Administrators can use a wizard driven service designer to define request forms and automate the delivery of their services along with application and other infrastructure services.
• vRA can integrate with other enterprise systems such as DNS, AD, IPAM, CMDBs and load balancers
• There is also Accelerated Application Deployment for application release automation which allows integration with the automation suite.
• It can be integrated with VMware IT Business Management Standard Edition which automatically populates cost profiles where businesses can then compare private and public cloud service offerings.
• It can allow businesses to keep control over service provisioning and who has access to use service catalogs and processes

vRA versions

• Standard (1000 managed machines, 2500 concurrent deployments and 10 concurrent deployments and extension to cloud support)
• Advanced (10,000 managed machines, 2500 catalog items, 50 concurrent deployments, High availability firewall setup and configuration of network load balancers
• Enterprise (50,000 managed machines, 2500 catalog items, 100 concurrent deployments.) Platform as a service, application delivery, service level agreements and the leveraging of disaster recovery when managing and delivering applications

Check the link below for a more detailed comparison

http://www.vmware.com/products/vrealize-automation/compare.html

vRA Primary Policies

• Business Groups – Administrators can define a multi level grouping structure linked to AD allowing role based access in the groups
• Resource Reservations – Virtual, physical or cloud resources can be allocated to each group. Costs and service levels can be applied to the resource reservations. A request will generate a cost to the business.
• Service Blueprints – These define policies which will control the provisioning and ongoing management of compute and application services. Each blueprint can be unique
• Entitlements – Merge business groups and specified users with services and policies. A variety of groups can then use the same blueprint with their own group policy rather than have a unique blueprint for each business group

vRA Roles

System Administrator

• Installs vRA
• Creates Tenants
• Manages system wide configuration
• Designates who is going to manage the infrastructure fabric

IAAS Administrator

• Manages the discovery and organization of compute, network and storage groups
• Manages endpoints requires to interact with resources on virtual, physical and public cloud environments
• Configures and manages fabric groups post discovery of fabric resources. Fabric groups can be used to divide resources used by one organisation to another. Many companies will only have one fabric group however if you need to allow isolation between groups in a company or need specific tenant branding then a number of tenants can be configured.

Tenant Administrator

• Configures vRA according to the requirements of the business
• Responsible for user and group management
• Tenant branding
• Business policies such as entitlements and approvals
• Track resource usage by all the users within the tenant and initiate reclamation requests for machines no longer being used.
• Responsible for creating one or more business groups within the tenant group and assigning users

Business Group Administrator

• Able to make blueprints for their business group only
• Take the business groups that the tenant admin issues to them and create content for the business users

What is the Service Catalog?

• Contains Service Categories which can be broken down into groups to abstract services
• They contain the unique application, infrastructure or other services available to request and use
• Service architects can define and publish new services from the catalog
• The tenant administrator and the business group manager will organise the catalog
• Contains a goal navigator which guides you through vRA administration tasks such as organizing the fabric, configuring tenants or designing and publishing blueprint information.

Catalog Management

This has 4 functions

• Services – Examples such as Development services or Production Services
• Catalog Items – Items such as Linux web server or hardened Windows 2012 server
• Actions – Ability to carry out actions on a catalog item such as Destroy virtual machine, expire virtual machine, power off and restart etc
• Entitlements – Defines which users or groups can request catalog items or perform actions

What are Blueprints?

• A whole specification containing resource such as CPU, RAM and storage for a virtual, physical or cloud machine along with attributes and the way it is provisioned.
• They specify the workflow associated with blueprint and additional provisioning information
• Examples might include a Windows Server 2012 server with 4G RAM, 6 vCPUs and 40GB of storage
• Specify policies such as lease time of the machine and what actions are able to be carried out on the provisioned service.
• Multi machine services can be configured into a single blueprint making it extremely efficient to build a service containing a web server, database server and an application server.
• Note: It is only through the multi-machine blueprint that you are able to configure advanced operations such as the dynamic creation of NAT, Routed and Private networks

Application Blueprints

Enables the concept of Design Once – Deploy anywhere

• Uses a drag and drop screen to model an application blueprint
• Logical templates, application components and scripts can be added to the application blueprint
• Component installation order is done by creating dependency links
• Users do not need to know the underlying infrastructure in order to create the applications
• The type of cloud to deploy to can be selected such as vRA, vCD or Amazon AWS
• Each application can have multiple deployment profiles if it needs to be deployed in multiple cloud providers
• Inconsistencies, errors and rework can be reduced or eliminated
• Blacklisting can be used to prevent applications being deployed in a particular environment.

IT Business Management

• Relates to chargeback and making the consumer aware of the cost of infrastructure and consumption
• ITBM makes it easier to set up and implement a charging model and also compare internal costs to public cloud vendor costs

Advanced Service Designer

ASD allows administrators to deliver additional services not covered by the out of the box functionality

• Wizard driven approach to designing end to end functionality
• Once built the custom service can be published in the vCloud Automation Center
• The process can define service capabilities, user interaction and entitlements
• Define the automated workflows for the service by using existing vCloud Orchestrator workflows and plugins along with custom scripts

Extensibility

• Leverage existing and future infrastructure with multi-vendors, multi-cloud infrastructures (Physical, Public and Cloud)
• Configure personalised business services. Modification of vRA policies and custom properties (metadata tags)
• Integration with third-party management systems. Using ASD and VCO you can extend the out of the box functionaility
• Adding new IT services and creation of new Day2 Operations allows the use of workflows and plugins to deliver the Anything as a Service
• vRA provides a REST API which can be used to call vRA from other infrastructure applications

Configuration Management

• Configurations tend to drift over time and third-party products can complement vRA by providing configuration management and configuration drift management
• Puppet Labs is an example of this providing thousand of out of the box modules which can be used in vRA. These modules can describe configurations of OS, networks, storage, middleware components and applications
• The cloud management marketplace provides these modules
• Puppet supports environments such as hybrid clouds giving companies the flexibility to deploy any service into any environment

Distributed Execution Manager (DEMs)

• Executes the business logic of custom models interacting with internal, external databases and systems as required.
• DEMs can manage cloud and physical machines
• Each DEM instance performs either a Worker or Orchestrator role

DEM Worker

• The Worker role executes workflows

DEM Orchestrator 

• The Orchestrator role monitors DEM Worker instances, pre-processing workflows and scheduling workflows
• Monitors the status of DEM workers and if a worker instance stops or loses connection to the Model Manager then the workflows are resubmitted for another DEM Worker to pick up.
• Manages scheduled workflows and starts new workflows at scheduled times
• Ensures that one scheduled workflow is running at a given time
• Pre processes workflows before execution checking preconditions (RunOneOnly feature) and creating the history of the workflow
• It is recommended to have at least one redundant Orchestrator instance on a separate machine for redundancy. This 2nd instance monitors the status of the active Orchestrator and will take over if this goes offline

vRA Agents

vRA uses agents to integrate with external systems

Proxy Agents

• vRA uses virtualization proxy agents to send commands and collect data from ESXi, Xen Server and Hyper V hosts and the VMs provisioned on them
• These proxy agents require Admin access to the virtualisation hosts, communication with the vRA Management Service and is installed separately with its own configuration file

Integration Agents

• VDI PowerShell agents allow vRA to integrate with external VDI systems
• VMs can be registered with XenDesktop on a Citrix Desktop Delivery Controller and users can access the Xen Desktop Web interface from vRA for example
• External provisioning integration PowerShell agents (EPI) allow vRA to integrate external systems into the machine provisioning workflow such as integration with Citrix Provisioning Server
• Requires Admin access to external systems

WMI Agent

• vRA WMI agents allows you to monitor and control system information allowing you to manage remote servers from a central location
• Enables the collection of data from vRA managed Windows machines

Managing EndPoints

• The Infrastructure Admin defines endpoints which are required to discover virtual, physical or public cloud infrastructure resources
• vRA discovers and manages the underlying infrastructure through the device managers which manages those resources
• Ongoing rediscovery happens daily
• Can be configured via the infrastructure tab or select the fabric configuration option from the goals navigator

vCloud Hybrid Service

• Allows companies to expand their private data centers to the cloud
• Allows applications to run on site and offsite without interruption
• Supports more than 3500 applications certified to run on vSphere
• Now certified out of the box with vRA
• Customers can use the vCloud Hybrid Service as another vCloud Director end point in vRA
• Endpoint information includes the location and credentials required to access each vCenter instance which is stored and encrypted in the vRA repository
• Endpoints can be defined one at a time by the management console to imported in bulk via a .csv file

NSX

• Network virtualization allows VMs to communicate securely with each other over physical and virtual networks
• vRA supports NSX
• Fabric Admins can create external network profiles to define existing physical networks and create NAT, Routed and Private network profiles
• Network templates specify items such as IP address, DNS server, DHCP server
• Multi machine blueprints allow configuration of network adapters and load balancing
• Multi machine blueprints allow the selection of a transport zone which identifies the vSphere endpoint. Both the blueprint and the reservations used in the provisioning must have the same transport zone settings
• Transport zones are defined in the NSX and vCloud Networking and Security environments

vRA installation components

• SSO (Single Sign On) capabilities
• User interface portal
• IAAS components

VMware Identity Appliance

• Pre-configured virtual appliance that provides single sign on capabilities for vRA. vCenter SSO 5.5.0b can be used as an alternative

VMware VRA Appliance

• Pre-configured virtual appliance that deploys the vRA server delivered as an OVF (Open virtualization format)
• Deployed into the existing infrastructure
• Postgres database
• vCO and ASD integration

IAAS

• Enables the efficient provisioning of servers and desktops across virtual, physical, private and hybrid clouds
• Contains customisable components such as IAAS website, DEMs, Model Manger, Manager Services, Database and agents

Installation Minimums

Check browser compatibility along with resource minimums

SSO

• 1 CPU
• 2GB RAM
• 2GB storage

vRA Appliance

• 2 CPU
• 8GB RAM
• 30GB storage

IAAS Components

• 2 CPU
• 8GB RAM
• 30GB storage