Yesterday after a few weeks of studying during my spare time (which is limited due to work and family) I sat the VCP7-CMA and am pleased to say I passed I do have to give a disclaimer though that I was white labelled VMware PSO for a number of years and delivered enterprise level vRA deliveries and attempted but sadly failed my VCDX6-CMA two years ago so I didn’t start with zero knowledge.
Resources used
Due to having worked with and used vRealize Automation in my past my studying focused around reminding myself of pieces seeing as I haven’t touched vRA in almost three years and also updating my knowledge on some of the recent changes. I largely used the study resources listed on my blog here: https://thesaffageek.co.uk/vsphere-6-x-cma-study-resources/vcp6-cma/ but read and watched the “what’s new in vRA7” videos and blog postings out there as well.
The exam I found didn’t really require you to have any real world hands on experience and if someone read all the recommended resources I think you could pass it.
The exam
The exam consists of 85 multiple choice questions and you have 90 minutes to do the exam. I got a 355 out of 500 and I know I got ones wrong where it asked you console questions where unless by chance you’ve used it recently you’d have to have an educated guess like I did. The questions aren’t very long and only one or two were worded a bit strangely. I took my time and reviewed a few questions at the end where I had marked them if it took me more than a minute to decide an answer.
Good luck if you are looking to take the exam, I think it’s more than achievable and the recommended resources will give you a good idea what to learn and also set you up in the event you want to start using vRA.
Evaluate logical performance considerations for a given vRealize Automation solution.
Performance considerations will be the number of virtual machines the solution has to provide sufficient resources for as well as future growth (20% growth over the next 3 years) . This is very much like vSphere sizing but now with the speed with which solutions can be created, modified and deleted especially if you are doing CDCI you need to also prepare for the number of continuous deployments and workflows at once. For example a DEM worker can only process 15 concurrent workflows at a time so if you are likely to be doing 60 workflows simultaneously due to the lifecycle of your machines then you are going to need at least four DEM workers to be deployed to handle this.
Performance also entails using mechanisms such as Storage DRS to automatically load balance provisioned workloads as they are requested, DRS to load balance the workloads across the hosts in the solution and performance of the vRA management components by isolating them in a management cluster, ensuring they are load balanced so one side isn’t always hit and the other is doing nothing. They don’t mention it in the tools but for this section and the exam as a whole I would recommend reading the latest vCAT documentation as well as the vRA 6.2 Reference Architecture document .
Differentiate infrastructure qualities related to performance.
Just like I have mentioned for the availability and management sections, the infrastructure quality for performance will need to be applied to certain requirements and designs decisions in the exam via drag and drop questions (I have done the exam so I am basing this on experience) . The performance infrastructure quality is defined as:
Indicates the effect of a design choice on the performance of the environment. This does not necessarily reflect the impact on other technologies within the infrastructure.
Key metrics:
Response time
Throughput
Analyze the current performance of an environment and address gaps when building a logical design.
So this is down to you deploying the vRA solution in an existing environment where there are workloads running and you need to analyse the performance of the environment to ascertain if the environment meets the performance requirements or if additional resources/another environment is required for the solution to work.
There are a number of methods to do this:
Get a VMware partner or VMware to run an analysis via VMware Capacity Planner to work out what your current environment is doing.
Use vRealize Operations Manager to give you a current state analysis as well as use historical data to work out trends and if there are month end increases in performance requirements or seasonal increases depending on the company’s business.
vSphere performance charts can also give you a not bad idea of what is happening if the above two aren’t possible as well as 3rd party tools.
Use a conceptual design to create a logical design that meets performance requirements.
In the conceptual design you will have defined and signed off the requirements. In these requirements there should be a number of them that apply to the performance infrastructure quality for example “The solution must be able to support the provisioning of 500 workloads a day” and “the solution must be able to service 5000 workloads with a 20% increase year on year for the next five years”
You will also have requirements where due to BC/DR requirements you will need spare capacity in the event of a failure so for example “The production workloads in Site A which makes up 20% of the 5000 workloads need to run on the secondary site in the event of a planned or emergency failover” .
Determine performance-related functional requirements based on given non-functional requirements and service dependencies.
Non-functional requirements are normally constraints imposed by the customer so for example the customer has defined you have to use existing networking in the datacentres and these are only 1GB switches which will severely impact what is possible from the solution. So if we keep to my example then having a service dependency that needs to talk to a physical SQL server where large amounts of data is transferred between the services to the database a single 1 GB link won’t be sufficient so either the service will have to be scaled down or the SQL database created as part of the service to allow inter virtual switch connectivity thereby allowing higher network throughputs.
Define capacity management practices and create a capacity plan.
Incorporate scalability requirements into the logical design.
This has been covered above already but what they are looking for is for you to design for future growth of the environment as the number of workloads increases and/or the amount of workload requests increases. The vRealize Automation reference architecture document also gives great coverage of scalability
Determine a performance component for service level agreements and service level management processes.
I covered this in the availability section where you have done a business impact analysis and worked out what theirs RPO and RTO values are. Part of availability also ties into performance as if the solution is running so slowly that users can’t use it then the service is essentially down and SLA’s are possibly not being met.
Evaluate which management services can be used with a given vRealize Automation Solution.
Management of vRealize Automation is achieved via various methods and solutions. You have management of the underlying vSphere infrastructure via the vSphere client and web client, management and monitoring of both vSphere and vRA via vRealize Operations with management packs for vRA, logging via vRealize LogInsight, change management via third part CMDB tools as well as VMware tools such as vRealize Configuration Manager and Hyperic.
There is also the standard vRA management via the vRA portal and the VAMI portals for management of the vRealize Appliances. I haven’t done the exam but based on previous exam experience I would make sure you know what tabs and options there are for all the vRA VAMI portals.
Differentiate infrastructure qualities related to management.
I partly covered this in the previous 2.3 posting, what they are likely to do from previous experience ( I have not done the exam nor the beta) is to give you a whole bunch of infrastructure qualities and you have to match them up. Manageability is all about ease of management and having the most optimal amount of manageability without impacting other infrastructure qualities or any of the requirements.
Build interfaces into the logical design for existing operations practices.
My take on what they are looking for here is that the customer you are doing the design for has existing operations practices and solutions and you need to take these into account and then design the solution to meet these. So for example if the customer has a CMDB and every time a machine is requested, built, edited and destroyed CI’s need to be passed to the CMDB to track these changes. Another example is syslogging and setting up syslog’s to go to a customer existing logging solution. Reading through the reference architecture and getting an understanding of what kinds of external solutions and services you might need to plug in to is great prep for this. Also adding the vRA management to AD,NTP,SNMP and DNS is very applicable and is required for all deployments (maybe not SNMP for every one)
Address operational readiness deficiencies.
This is where either the customers IT team who are going to look after the solution when you leave aren’t skilled up enough or they don’t have anyone to manage it at all (I’ve seen both in my experience). To fix this knowledge transfer workshops are required, or to link to the manageability infrastructure quality you simplify management as much as possible and try use their existing management mechanisms if they fit so allow easier management of the solution building on existing knowledge. You can also put it as a constraint the lack of existing knowledge to manage the solution and the risk mitigation is training of the team via formal training or learning from yourself and/or the person deploying the solution. You should also read the recommended Operational Readiness Assessment document from VMware.
Define Event, Incident and Problem Management practices.
These are where the logging of the solution and the management of the solution by tools such as vROps, LogInsight, vSphere alarms and event management via 3rd party tools such as Arcsight. The use of LogInsight and vROps is a great combination as they integrate brilliantly together and with the use of the management packs for vRA and LogInsight give amazing manageability of events, incident and problems with intelligent alarms. These can also be tracked by tools such as Service Now which is a fairly popular option for large enterprises in my experience and VMware have even written blogs about the integration http://blogs.vmware.com/management/2015/01/integrating-vrealize-automation-servicenow.html
Design a log management solution.
As mentioned above log management can be done via VMware solutions or 3rd part solutions. LogInsight is most likely the one they are going to reference in the exam seeing as it is VMware’s solution and you can get a vRA management pack for it to allow it to alert on vRA specific alerts https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/store/products/vra-6-1-log-insight-content-pack .
Determine request fulfilment and release management processes.
Request fulfilment I am taking as the fulfilment of all the required parameters to provision as service from the vRA catalogue. You would do this via the service design that you have done for each service where you have defined what parameters need to be fed in and that incorrect values aren’t inserted to ensure service requests are successful. In regards to ASD this is where you make sure the request form is using optimal selection boxes to make sure letters aren’t used where only number should be inserted and drop down lists are used so that only applicable options can be selected.
Release management would also be done in the service design document although it might be the same across all the service offerings or might differ per service offering based on the lifecycles. This would be the definition of when new blueprints are published, where they are published, who they are published to and version control.
Define change management processes based on business requirements.
Change management can be done via logging to ensure if any changes are made they are tracked, this can also be done via the Service Now method I mentioned earlier as well as change management via vRealize Configuration Manager. During design workshops you should ascertain what change management processes they need to follow and then make sure those are met via usage of API’s to the CMDB solution or logging to LogInsight or Arcsight for example.
Based on customer requirements, identify required reporting assets and processes.
Very much like above the customer will define what kind of reporting they are looking for or what you think they should be getting and then producing these reports via tools such as vROps or LogInsight. For the exam I think they are going to have certain reporting requirements given to you such as the Infrastructure manager wants to get a daily report around any alerts that were found in vRA for the past day or sent an email if an alarm is triggered in vRA.
Evaluate dependencies for infrastructure and application services that will be included in a vRealize Automation design.
One of vRealize Automations biggest selling points is its ability to provision various services and applications be they single tier services or multi-tier services including load balancers and network isolation via NSX. When you are creating a vRealize Automation design for your customers they will have a number of services and applications in mind that they want to make available for consumption via vRA. You job and the point of this section is that you need to discovery and evaluate all of the required infrastructure and application services required.
This can either be existing infrastructure needed by the applications or due to company policies so for example if you are provisioning multiple machines to test code and then commit it back depending on the success or failure then that existing infrastructure might be something like GIT. Or it might need to be tracked via a CMDB so an existing CMDB needs to be available and able to be communicated with via the infrastructure so that it can be logged and tracked. The infrastructure may also be something that needs to be created as part of the service so something like an NSX edge to isolate a service from existing services every time they are deployed would then need to be created as part of the service.
There are various ways to do this and from my experience doing a few normally allows you to cover it pretty well. These are:
· Interviews with existing service owners to understand how it is done at present (if it is being done at present that is)
· Existing documentation around service design if available.
· Design workshops with the current users of a service offering as well as the companies IT team and project sponsors to understand what they want the vRA offering to offer.
· Via usage of VMware vCenter™ Application Discovery Manager which monitors the existing environments, applications and infrastructure and gives you an overview of what the existing services are actually connected to and using for the service. This is a brilliant tool if you have it at your disposal and can also be used in conjunction with vRealize Infrastructure Navigator.
Create Entity Relationship Diagrams that map service relationships and dependencies.
These diagrams are normally created as part of the service design document you should be creating for each service offering you are planning to make available within vRA and so that it is easier to understand what all the interdependencies are between the various components that make up the service.
For the exam they are most likely going to want you to do some drag and drop or even visio style questions for these diagrams so I would make sure you practice creating these kinds of diagrams in visio or paint for applications within your own environment
Analyze interfaces to be used with new and existing business processes.
This is vRealize Infrastructure Navigator work where VIN scans the environment and gives you a mapping of all interfaces that current services are using. There’s a BRILLIANT YouTube video by VMware that covers not just this heading but also the first heading https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uu0bGB7bc4A
Determine service dependencies for logical components.
For service dependencies you can use VIN again as the tool to determine this. The video mentioned above gives a great example of exchange dependencies.
Include service dependencies in a vRealize Automation logical design.
Personally I like to create separate design document for each service design rather than stick it into the vRA logical design but these can be portrayed either via the relationship diagrams or via flow charts showing the dependencies along with definitions of all the required components that make up the service offering.
Analyze services to identify upstream and downstream dependencies.
Again this can be done via VIN and Application Discovery Manager where you can ascertain what is required in what order so for example you will need a SQL database instance up and running before you can deploy a web services web servers and application servers.
Navigate logical components and their interdependencies and make decisions based upon all service relationships.
I take it they are looking for you to see a whole bunch of logical components and are told of their interdependencies and for you to then put them in the correct order to ensure it is built correctly.
A number of weeks ago I sat my VCP6-CMA exam (I’ve been working on my VCDX6-CMA submission hence the delay in posting this) after being told that passing one of the hopefully soon to be released VCAP6-CMA exams doesn’t automatically get you the underlying VCP6.
So with three days to go before the exam I managed to sit down and study for the exam. Now this isn’t something would recommend and it wasn’t something I had planned but with my having been working on a very large scale vRA 6 design and deployment for the last 18 months I took a chance. The blueprint covers everything you need to know just like all the other exams and there are no tricks where things aren’t on the blueprint but in the exam.
For study resources I used everything mentioned on my VCP6-CMA page to prepare. The resources available are perfect and the Pluralsight courses as well as the ICM on demand course were integral in my preparations (albeit i had watched these quite a while ago so didn’t re-watch them due to time constraints).
The exam is extremely fair and if you have used vRA for a while either in production, test or in your lab and you learn all the parts on the blueprint around vRA and vRB then you should have no issues passing the exam.
I finished the exam with 20 minutes to spare and got a reasonable 420 out of 500. 🙂
Due to my decision to aim for my VCDX6-CMA this year and thereby to get it in in time for the only VCDX-CMA defence of the year (so far) I have signed up for the VCAP6-CMA Design beta exam. I’ve been working on a very large-scale vRA 6.2 project for the past 14 months and so I hope this experience of designing and building it as well as my preparations via these objectives breakdown (plus my study resources) and using some of my VCDX5-DCV knowledge will help me. So I thought I would slowly post up each objective for my own benefit but also hopefully help other people looking to pass the VCAP6-CMA Design exam (beta or GA).I will be consolidating all the objectives on my blog page here.
Knowledge
Analyze requirements for functional and non-functional elements.
Analysing requirements and determining if they are functional or non-functional is the same method as you would do for the DCD or DTD exams. I mentioned in an earlier objective breakdown that if it is a constraint it is a non-functional requirement. Although the way I always did it for my DCD is that functional is when something should DO something & non-functional is HOW that something should be done. Scott Lowe covers them nicely in his vSphere Design Trainsignal videos.
Build non-functional requirements into a specific logical design.
This I’ll take it that you will be given non-functional requirements such as the usage of certain storage or networking or a front end portal and have to include it in a Visio style diagram. So using the storage one they might say they have iSCSI storage and you have to ensure you have it designed correctly for the usage of this storage.
Translate stated business requirements into a logical design.
Just like I covered in a previous objective you have to take down the objectives in a number of design workshops and interviews and now that they are defined and are accurate and signed off you can apply this into a logical design. So for example if they have stated they want the solution to cover two sites then you will design for maybe a stretched cluster or two instances running with two clustered vRA appliances with one on each site and the underlying vRA infrastructure below it. The vRA reference architecture gives a great overview of different design outlines and methods.
Incorporate the current state of a customer environment into a logical design.
Really straight forward in my opinion. If they say that their environment has certain storage or number of sites or limitations of networking etc then incorporate that into the design. This will have all been collected from design workshops, current state analysis as mentioned in the previous objective and interviews with SME’s.
VMware Recommended Tools
The VMware recommended study tools for this objective are:
If you disagree with anything I’ve said above then please let me know and if I agree (I’m always open to learning) then I will update the posting. Now onto objective 2.2.
Due to my decision to aim for my VCDX6-CMA this year and thereby to get it in in time for the only VCDX-CMA defence of the year (so far) I have signed up for the VCAP6-CMA Design beta exam. I’ve been working on a very large-scale vRA 6.2 project for the past 14 months and so I hope this experience of designing and building it as well as my preparations via these objectives breakdown (plus my study resources) and using some of my VCDX5-DCV knowledge will help me. So I thought I would slowly post up each objective for my own benefit but also hopefully help other people looking to pass the VCAP6-CMA Design exam (beta or GA).I will be consolidating all the objectives on my blog page here.
Knowledge
Evaluate the customer-s current capacity requirements.
This can be done by a few methods, the most common two is via capacity planner which is a tool open to VMware partners and VMware themselves which evaluates the current customers environment for a number of weeks and the gives you an output of what is being consumed. The other which I’m certain they will be using for the exam especially seeing as it is one of the study tools recommended for this objective is vRealize Operations. vRealize Operations will give you great indications their current capacity and if it is enough for the solution you are looking to design or not. There is also a management pack for vRealize Operations for vRA so knowing about this and a good base understanding of how vRealize operations works is highly beneficial. The following resources should give you that base knowledge around vROps as well as vRealize Business/ITBM:
Again this can be done via vROps and via the usage of dashboards or just via the built in categories provided by vROps. Apart from this I personally can’t see any other ways to cover this piece so if you think of anything then please do let me know.
Recognize organizational structure and governance requirements.
Governance for companies is a major design challenge but is also one of the biggest requirements you have to meet during a project. There are a wide range of governance policies out there from PCI to security hardening to HIPAA. For this piece I am taking it that during a design scenario the customer will mention some kind of governance they need to keep to and this decision will obviously impact how the solution is designed.
Organisational structure is understanding different departments and their possible requirments for separation and seeing as vRealize Business is mentioned in the study tools in the exam blueprint then the ability of vRB to do show-back and chargeback on different departments/Business Groups within vRA.
Analyze application architecture.
This is a lot like a previous sections requirements where you need to understand how an application is architected to meet the requirements of the application. As I mentioned this can be done via your design workshops with the application owners and via vRealize Infrastructure Navigator. Once you have an understanding this can then be mapped out in Application services or via the usage of multi-machine blueprints to name but two options. What they are going to test you on here is most likely diagrams of applications and then understanding how they are configured. Or possibly even a Visio style diagram where you have to take their text information and design the applications architecture in “AS”. Practicing doing this kind of design in Visio is a great way of practicing this skill.
VMware Recommended Tools
The VMware recommended study tools for this objective are:
If you disagree with anything I’ve said above then please let me know and if I agree (I’m always open to learning) then I will update the posting. Now onto objective 2.1.
Due to my decision to aim for my VCDX6-CMA this year and thereby to get it in in time for the only VCDX-CMA defence of the year (so far) I have signed up for the VCAP6-CMA Design beta exam. I’ve been working on a very large-scale vRA 6.2 project for the past 14 months and so I hope this experience of designing and building it as well as my preparations via these objectives breakdown (plus my study resources) and using some of my VCDX5-DCV knowledge will help me. So I thought I would slowly post up each objective for my own benefit but also hopefully help other people looking to pass the VCAP6-CMA Design exam (beta or GA).I will be consolidating all the objectives on my blog page here
Knowledge
Differentiate between the concepts of risks, requirements, constraints, and assumptions.
Firstly I’ll take it you know the definitions of Risks, Constraints, Assumptions and Requirements. If not I would recommend looking them up and there is great overview in the VMware recommended study resource around CAD’s.
We covered what requirements are, how you would collect them and how they needed to be concise and be mapped to the infrastructure qualities of AMPRS in objective 1.2. During the workshops and interviews you have done with the customer you will also have picked up that a number of their requirements will have been around using certain technologies or certain methods for the project.
A constraint is where the customer has asked you to use a certain vendors storage for example or that you have to use their existing network infrastructure. These are almost always non-functional requirements and your biggest challenge around this is understanding how the technology they have asked for you to use will impact the solution in a holistic manner. There are always constraints in a project and it is your job as the architect to record these and understand them and then determine if these are not going to meet what the customer requires from the solution (using a 1GbE network can be a severe one on a vRA design) , is a risk to the project (the existing storage you have to use for the project is end of life in 18 months’ time and the migration to new storage is currently undefined from the vendor for example) or it actually meets the requirements of the solution and is just a constraint.
Risks as I mentioned above are a fair portion from the constraints but also external risks such as the project is being done the arab emirates and there are seasonal sandstorms that affect the communications to the data centre or it can be down to personnel where the people from the customer due to maintain the project once you leave have never touched VMware technology before. I like to have a risk register where I record all of these, rate them on their severity (Low,Medium,High and Critical) and also the risk mitigation or if there is no mitigation then that the project sponsor or someone high up has accepted this risk. So to use my example of customers IT team having no VMware knowledge or experience they could mitigate the risk by sending people on the required training and that there is dedicated time allocated to them outside BAU work to work with the consultants building the solution to gain knowledge and experience as well as knowledge transfer workshops at the end of the project.
Assumptions are where you can’t get a definitive answer on something that the project relies on and so you have to assume that it will be in place for the success of the project. Assumptions in real life designs should be as minimal as possible as it is your job as the architect to try get clarification on any assumptions but sometimes you have to have assumptions for example that the storage solution purchased from vendor XYZ will be built and configured in a resilient manner to a production level standard seeing as you aren’t the one doing this portion of the design.
Analyze impact of VMware best practices to identified risks, constraints, and assumptions.
“Best practices” are a double edged sword but for the exam these are the gospel and knowing the VMware way of designing it is a must (which is what it was like in the VCAP4-DCD and VCAP5-DCD I sat) . This is fairly straight forward if you understand my points in the section above. VMware best practices are covered largely in the vRealize Automation Reference Architecture document and the vCloud Architecture Toolkit (vCAT) documents.
Given a statement, determine whether it is a risk, requirement, constraint, or an assumption.
Very much the same as above in that if you understand what assumptions, risks and constraints are then you can amp them no problem. I think they only let you choose one quality per statement so my personal rule of thumb was that if it was between a risk and a constraints I chose it as a risk. Referring back to what I said earlier where not all constraints are risks is where you can have this difference in the exam.
VMware Recommended Tools
The VMware recommended study tools for this objective are:
If you disagree with anything I’ve said above then please let me know and if I agree (I’m always open to learning) then I will update the posting. Now onto objective 1.4.
Now that my VCDX defence is over and hopefully I’ve done enough to be awarded an illustrious number I can pick up my old responsibilities for the EMEA vBrownbag of which I am one of the hosts and decided that the VCP6-CMA track would be a great one to do.
We are going to be going through the blueprint in order so that it is easy to follow and watch as well if you are subscribed to the iTunes feed. So starting next week Tuesday at 7pm GMT (Clocks have changed in Europe so this is GMT not BST) we will be doing objective 1 and it is being covered by one of the co-hosts of the vBrownbag, Frank Buechsel. You can register for the series and future vBrownbag EMEA sessions via the following link https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/8540909933274906113 and can also subscribe to the vBrownbag YouTube channel.
If you are interested in covering an objective on the vBrownbag then please get touch as we are always looking for presenters.
Recently I was fortunate enough to design and build an enterprise level distributed installation of the vRealize Automation suite of products and integrate it into an enterprise environment. I’ve done several vRA/vCAC deployments before but each time I do a new deployment I like to collate information, read all the latest articles and make sure what worked in the past for me hasn’t changed or more likely has been enhanced so I can provide an even better deployment.
For those unsure of what an enterprise distributed deployment comprises of I have added a logical diagram below (click on the picture to expand it as it is fairly large)
For my current deployment it was based on vRealize Automation 6.1 due to it being part of an EMC Hybrid Cloud deployment but the architecture and layout are exactly the same for 6.2. (note this is defined after collecting customer requirements based on amount of workloads, NSX load balancing and the requirement of application services so make sure you have reasons for design decisions)
Resources
For the resources I used, some are ones I used in the past to learn how to do an enterprise deployment and some are ones I re-read prior to this deployment. I have listed them below to save me looking for them again but also to maybe help other people:
The first place anyone should start is the vRA documentation centre which has a large portion of the vRA documentation you will need to have read and at some points follow along with to do your deployment.
One of the most important documents to utilise is the Installation and Configuration document. As I mentioned, I was deploying vRA 6.1 so utilised the following document from page 43 onwards.
One challenge when deploying an enterprise level deployment of vRA is that you should at a minimum use internally signed certificates. For vRA if you are changing one on the components then you need to change all of them or else you will have a plethora of problems (I have spent countless hours in the past helping companies who have tried their own PoC , have only changed a few certificates and then deployed workloads that they now want to keep). For this portion I like to follow Eiad Al-Aqqad’s resources as to me they seem really straight forward and have worked really well in the past
NB: Make sure when importing the certificate into the appliances remember to remove the bag attributes at the beginning of the PEM file and start from —BEGIN CERTIFICATE—– until ——–END CERTIFICATE————-
Once you have the certificates prepared then you can start the deployments. I used the identity appliance rather than the vCenterSSO due to the identity appliance following the same upgrade schedule as all the other vRA components and in the past I have hit a few problems due to people using vCenter SSO. There are positives and negatives of using SSO so make sure you look at both options and select the correct option for your deployment. The official documentation is good but I also used Emad and Grants blogs for the deployment of the identity appliance
Next portion is the configuration of the external vPostgres database and for this I used the vRA appliance and disabled the services that were not required. For this i used the official documentation. If you don’t know how to deploy the vRA appliances then go to the next step , follow that then come back to this step (Although I do worry if you don’t know how to deploy an appliance)
Next are the IaaS components. This is SO MUCH easier than the vCAC 4.1 days now that there is the pre-req script. The script can be found here. Before installation of the IaaS components ensure you have ntrights.exe downloaded, a windows iso attached to the virtual machine (2012 requires this but 2008 never did) and java 7u75 downloaded in an easily searchable folder (java version is correct as of this posting). For these steps I was going to break it down into a few blog postings but fellow vBrownbag member, Jonathan Frappier has done such a cracking job I recommend you follow his:
Now that the components are installed it is time to grant permissions, create the required tenant/s for your cloud workloads apart from the default tenant and create all the business groups. Again Jonathan has broken this down brilliantly and this is what I re-read prior to my deployments
Now on to the application services, adding and preparing of vSphere templates and creating entitlements so that services can be requested. Again Jonathan has covered it perfectly ( as does the official documentation that you should be following alongside these)
Now for the vRO deployment as well as including NSX into vRA and installing the NSX plug-in to the vRO server. For vRO I used the windows method rather than the appliance route due to us being unable to do multi-hop WinRM using the PowerShell plugin when we need to run PowerShell scripts locally on multiple servers rather than locally on the vRO server. For this I used Sid Smith’s articles as well as the standard VMware documentation:
Received a “Failed to retrieve form from provider” when requesting a catalog item in vRA (this is using multi-machine rather than application services). This error is one I still have a ticket with engineering open for as what is happening is that when we do a quiesced backup of the vRO database this at times causes one of the vRO nodes to stop due to a timeout in connectivity to the database. Currently the only way fix is to start the stopped node. I will update this if/when VMware engineering give a realistic solution.
If you are unsure about any of the portions mentioned or want to know more, you can ask VMware Professional Services for whom I did this design and deployment or Xtravirt who are a VMware partner, to come in and help you with the design/configuration of your environment.
Also let me know if you think I missed something or if it helped you.
I do have to give a disclaimer though that I was white labelled VMware PSO for a number of years and delivered enterprise level vRA deliveries and attempted but sadly failed my VCDX6-CMA two years ago so I didn’t start with zero knowledge.
TheSaffaGeek 