Tagged: vra
EHC on VxRail – From Hooray! to EHC
Support was recently announced for the Dell EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud platform on the VxRail HCI appliance. Aimed at smaller enterprises, this platform has been greatly anticipated and is generating huge interest with customers. What may not be as widely known and appreciated is how much the overall installation is accelerated by the EHC Automated Installation Tool.
EHC Disaster Recovery as-a-Service Overview
The Enterprise Hybrid Cloud DRaaS solution leverages DellEMC RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines-based disaster recovery to restart or recover VMware virtual machine workloads and cloud management infrastructure to another converged infrastructure platform on an alternate site.
vRB Storage Costs by Storage Profile begone
For any customers accustomed to using VM Storage Profiles as a means to display their Storage Costs in vRealize Business, be aware that as of vSphere v6.0, this is no longer possible.
vR Ops and ViPR Alert Notifications
This post demonstrates how to create proactive alerts and notifications for DELL EMC ViPR within VMware vR Ops, and also how to link associated resolutions to the VMware vRA service catalog.
vRA VM Backup, Delete, Restore – What’s the Problem?
Virtual machine lifecycle management is a key feature and function of VMware vRA. Policies can be put in place to control virtual machine requests, approvals, provisioning, expiration, and reclamation. With the EHC solution, we can also include automatic backup and restore in the VM lifecycle.
But what happens when a user decides to destroy a VM, only to realise shortly afterwards their mistake, meaning they now need to restore a VM that has been destroyed? Well, that’s the thing …
vRB for Cloud and vR Ops Integration
As of vRB for Cloud v7.1, the integration between vRB and vRealize Operations Manager has changed to what the official documents describe as ‘seamless integration’.
Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Multisite Services
The release of Enterprise Hybrid Cloud v4.0 has enabled EHC customers to leverage EHC services across multiple sites. This multi-site functionality is one of the major themes for the v4.0 release and is based upon the ability to provide EHC services to multiple vCenter endpoints.
This post will explain some of the options available to EHC customers.
Upgrade vRB v6.2.3 to v7.1
We wanted to upgrade our EHC lab instance of vRealize Business Standard (v6.2.3) to vRealize Business for Cloud (v7.1.0). Using vRB v7.x has been a common request for some of our Financial customers who required vRB to support the Swiss Franc.
So after a quick glance at the vRB 7.x Install Guide, we realised that this is a migration, not an upgrade.
Enterprise Hybrid Cloud v4.0 is GA
This week sees the v4.0 release of the Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution. This release follows on from the EHC v3.5 release, and brings some much requested features and functionality.
Updating Certificates for vR Ops
Going through a process of converting all self-signed certificates in our EHC environment to CA-signed certs. First we converted all of the vCenter Server certificates, available here, but then we were faced with updating the certificates used by the various other vRealize Suite components that integrate with vCenter.
vRealize Operations Manager was the first on the list of those components.
Converting vCenter Self-signed Certs to CA-signed Certs
This post provides some high-level detail on what was required for us to migrate to CA-signed certificates on an existing vCenter Server installation. Our overall plan was to upgrade versions of the EHC solution (EHC v3.1 to EHC v3.5) which meant that we needed to upgrade from vSphere v5, using SSO, to vSphere 6, using the new PSC (Platform Services Controller).
EHC – Backup as a Service: Automated VM Protection
The Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution provides fully automated data protection backup and restore services for virtual machines, with EHC Backup as a Service (BaaS).
At virtual machine deployment time, cloud users in the vRealize Automation self-service portal, can choose to protect their machines with a predefined backup service level. This automatically adds data protection backup to their virtual machine, but also enables them to initiate on-demand, point-in-time backups and restores of their virtual machines.
Enterprise Hybrid Cloud: Creating a Backup Service Level
One of the services provided by the Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Solution (EHC) is Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS), which enables cloud users to manage and consume data protection backup services through a single user portal. The EHC solution leverages service levels throughout the solution, using policies to control resources such as compute, storage, network, and data protection.
In the EHC solution, a Backup Service Level = an EMC Avamar Backup Policy, but there’s a bit more gets configured under the covers.
Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Backup Admin Services
The Data Protection Backup services provided by the Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution are consumed by multiple cloud users. This post will introduce the services available to EHC Backup Administrators.
Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Backup-as-a-Service: Overview
The Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution provides fully automated Backup and Recovery services to its users. While technically an optional add-on to the foundation EHC solution, Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) is designed for all instances and configurations of EHC.
EHC BaaS configurations range from local single-site, to replicated multi-site implementations, with fully replicated and recoverable virtual machine backups, while all the time maintaining full backup/recovery services after DR events. Every feature and function of the EHC solution takes backup and recovery into consideration.
Branding vRA Catalog for Enterprise Hybrid Cloud
Appearance matters, so when you make the effort to install and configure vRA itself or as part of the Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution, it makes sense that you should customise/brand the vRA catalog services. This is especially important if the environment is customer-facing, be it a demo/PoC or a real customer environment.
vR Ops Management Packs for EHC
In response to a request from a colleague, I had grabbed screenshots of each of the Management Packs installed in vRealize Operations Manager, expanding each to display what dashboards were available within.
This could possibly be the least technical post on here, but anyway, it may be useful to some!
vRealize Integrations – vRA and vR Ops
vRealize Automation integrates with vRealize Operations Manager in a couple of ways, and it may not immediately be apparent which integration point is responsible for what functionality.
vRealize Integrations – Log Insight
The Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution uses VMware vRealize Log Insight for centralised and automated log management, analysing log events from any component that supports syslog forwarding, providing system analytics, aggregation and search capabilities.
vRealize Integrations – vRealize Business Management
One new configuration requirement that I have come across recently working with vRealize Automation is the increased integration and permissions between vRealize Business Standard, vCenter and vRealize Operations Manager.
