vRealize Automation is a very metadata-driven system through capabilities called custom properties. These properties—which are nothing more than key-value pairs—can be applied at multiple levels throughout vRA and cause it to behave in different ways. The same sort of metadata drives a lot of decision within vSphere …

For those who use vRealize Automation (vRA), you’re probably all too familiar with vSphere templates and how they are the crux of your service catalog. Unless you’re creating machine deployments anew from another build tool, you’re probably using them, and it’s likely you have at least two, sometimes many more. Using …

Everyone’s got one, everyone needs them, and most people struggle with them. I’m talking about custom machine names, of course. Just like organizations themselves, naming schemes can be, and are about, as varied as possible. Some companies have fairly straightforward names with maybe two elements while others have …

Between speaking with customers, architecting and deploying solutions, and helping others out with their issues on the VMware Communities forums, I encounter a lot of problems and get a lot of info on how customers do business with their CMPs. One of the requests that keeps coming up over and over again is how to deal …

Hi, all, short blog post today to inform you of some new community content. Logging is a pretty important thing these days (well, almost all days), and being able to implement that into your CMP is equally as important. VMware's Log Insight solution is a fantastic platform for aggregating, analyzing, and searching for …

I wrote last about attending VeeamON 2017 in New Orleans and you can view that here. As I was deep in various sessions or talking with peers and Veeam folks, several things stuck out in my mind as current gaps or “nice-to-haves” when it comes to Veeam. So after putting pen to paper, I identified four things I thought …

vRealize Automation 7.2 was released in late November with the much-heralded release of container support. You can read about it in the official announcement blog here and a post from Jad here, but other features also accompanied containers including support for Azure, ServiceNow integration, and others. Since …

This article is the third in a series of three which explore the vRealize Automation guest agent in depth. For the others, please see these links. Part 1: Adding machine requestor to local administrators group in vRA 7 Part 2: Running in-guest scripts on Windows VMs in vRA 7 Part 3: Running Bash commands in the Linux …

This article is the second in a series of three which explore the vRealize Automation guest agent in depth. For the others, please see these links. Part 1: Adding machine requestor to local administrators group in vRA 7 Part 2: Running in-guest scripts on Windows VMs in vRA 7 Part 3: Running Bash commands in the Linux …

Docker is a topic that seems all the rage today, and people and organizations are scrambling to understand the technology in order to power their next-generation apps with methodologies such as continuous delivery and micro-services. In order to make standing up Docker easier for those with vRealize Automation, I’ve …