vRealize Automation 7.3 - Integration with SCVMM 2012 R2

vRealize Automation CMP supports multi-hypervisor environment since a long time, however i had rarely found customer using vRA for capabilities beyond vSphere based services. 
However off-late customers who have been successfully using vRA with vSphere has started discussing plans to extend its use cases for integration with SCVMM, Containers, 3rd party ITSM tools etc. 

Hence i thought of putting down some of these integration steps for ease of deployment for similar requirements.
This post would talk about integration of SCVMM with vRA.

vRealize Log Insight : vRA Provisioning Status - Custom Dashboards Part 2

The Part 1 of the series explained the procedure to capture the CatalogItem Request Status.

We now will see how in the same UI, we capture the requester details as well.

Post Series PART 2: CatalogItems Requester Details

The one is an easy one. If you observe the below event closely, you will see the RequestedFor section which shows the name of the Requester.

vRealize Log Insight : vRA Provisioning Status - Custom Dashboards Part 1

Both vROPs and vRLI already have Management Pack and Content Pack respectively for vRealize Automation, which shows a lot of useful information.
However recently one of my customer demanded that as a Business Group owner or Tenant Admin, if i want to see 

• Catalog-Items requested over time
• Who all requested which all CatalogItems
• How many successfully deployed and how many failed
• How much time did it take for the Catalog Request to complete etc etc... 

...without login to the vRA console, how can we achieve it.

The obvious expectation was to monitor it using vROPs or vRLI. But none of them share this information out of the box. 
So it got me thinking that since all this information is available in form of events in 

/var/log/vmware/vcac/catalina.out, if i can use vRLI Custom Dashboard UI to achieve it.

Hence i started working on this project.

In this series of posts, i will try to share the recipe of creating these Dashboards, as the ingredients are unique for every setup. Which is why you may not find a readymade content pack at the end of this blog :)

To begin with Let's start with the first post...

Post Series PART 1: Catalog-Items Request UI

vRealize Log Insight - Role Based Access Control

Role Based Access Control let system administrators control user access to vRealize Log Insight. This post talks about the configuring RBAC with vRealize Log Insight and using it control the access to sections of vRLI UI.

RBAC can be configured with local users, as well with some central identity source (like Active Directory) based users as well 

vRLI used to offer integration using vIDM and direct Active Directory till v4.3. 
From v4.5 onwards AD integration is deprecated. The option is still available but for users to transition from AD to vIDM integration.

vRealize Log Insight - Retention Period Feature Request

Customer who are using vRealize Log Insight has a frequent query around Retention Period for logs. 
Currently to achieve a specific retention period, we need to calculate the Retention basis the log ingestion EPS and the sizing calculation for disk capacity.
Steve Flanders has written a good article around the same available here.

However it may not be necessary that we have a static environment and the log ingestion rate doesn't change. Hence the storage capacity calculation may need to be revisited.

It would be better if we can define retention period based for individual endpoints and possibly by just defining the retention time period value.

Hence i have voted for the Feature Request on loginsight.vmware.com

In case you find the requirement as a useful request, please share your vote for the same.

vRealize Log Insight - Capturing Application Logs

The more we talk about vRLI (vRealize Log Insight), the more are customers falling in love with it.

In today's enterprises either customers would have a generic syslog server-predominantly used for storing logs for future audits/analysis, or, would have an advanced log analytic tool.

vRealize Automation VMRC Console - Blank Black Screen

Most of you would already be aware of the "Connect using VMRC" option for a Virtual Machine through the vRealize Automation Self Service Console.

Its one of the most commonly used feature and i have never faced any challenges with it up until one of my customers complaint that they are getting a Black black screen while connecting with VMRC.

I immediately started thinking it towards a port problem.
VMRC through vRA uses TCP port 8444 from endpoint browser to VRA. So we tried a telnet and it worked...hence it wasn't a port issue.