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, …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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Removal of datastores is one of those things that seems like it would be simple, and it’s not complex, but there a few steps and you have to do them in the correct order to produce the best result. There are also some KB articles out there that are rather outdated, have mixed information, and don’t cover the graphical …

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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 …

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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 …

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I encountered this issue in my home lab recently whereby vCSA 6.5 U1c was failing the file-based backup through the VAMI with the message “BackupManager encountered an exception. Please check logs for details.” A very generic error message to be sure, and not at all helpful. I checked the log responsible at …

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In vSphere 6, the Platform Services Controller (PSC) contains a number of pieces of functionality including the SSO components, certificates, licensing, and other core parts that make vCenter function. Because of its importance, it is possible to join external PSCs that share the same SSO domain in a replication …

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