Since I’ve been working with software components in vRealize Automation (vRA), one of the difficulties I see come up time and time again in Windows environments is the need to run a specific command or component with specific credentials. This is quite common even outside of the scope of vRA. There are multiple ways to …

Although there are numerous deployment and config management tools out there, none have had as much traction and continued success as Ansible. Purchased by Red Hat in October 2015, Ansible continues to gain steam in every corner. One of the great things about it and keys to its success is its agentless design. Rather …

Today I want to introduce and provide a walk-through on how to use what I think is one of the coolest modules SovLabs has produced to date for vRealize Automation: Backup-as-a-Service (or BaaS for short). BaaS is one of those pie-in-the-sky dreams for many CMP owners and operators and, frankly, the aim of lots of other …

Today, I wanted to spend some time returning to a basic principle of vRealize Automation (vRA) which is central to creating customized request forms and limiting blueprint sprawl. This is also a subject which is often requested from users. Unfortunately, those unfamiliar with vRA often think this type of customization …

Software components (SCs) are pretty neat in vRA (although you pay a pretty penny for them), but they have some serious shortcomings. One of the really cool abilities of them is to “bind” or let a property (variable, really) assume the value of something else inside that blueprint. This makes scripts much more dynamic, …

Email is one of those things that most of us take for granted these days. We just expect email works, that it is flexible, and that it’s adaptable to our situation. Within vRA, we can also get email in and out based on a variety of scenarios. But when it comes to customizing how that looks and works, it’s a little …

Welcome back to another installment of the exploration of the SovLabs modules! A while back, I went through and introduced the Property Toolkit module via a use case of dynamically building custom properties based on the presence of other custom properties. I illustrated this in the form of placement in vCenter …

I realized that although I have covered several of the SovLabs modules already with some fine use cases, I might have jumped the gun a little and not fully explained what this SovLabs business is and how I got to those points. I often receive the question “is it a vRO plug-in?” and so realize a little introduction is …

Have you ever needed or wanted to dynamically get the users within an Active Directory group through vRA? The process I hoped would already exist but, unfortunately as I found out, the existing vRO Active Directory plug-in does not contain a pre-built workflow or action to handle this. As I typically do, I find my own …

vRealize Automation is useful for deploying a variety of different items as-a-service, from simple IaaS to databases to container hosts and, of course applications. And most of these have been demonstrated to date. One other piece that is often forgotten about is monitoring agents on these systems, or maybe it’s done …