vRealize Suite LifeCycle Manager (vRSLM) has now been around for a while and if you are a vRealize or vCloud Suite license holder this is definitely a product that should be part of our VMware portfolio. I am a bit backward because in my last post is showed how to upgrade your vRA environment using vRSLM and only now will I show how to actually install vRA which actually just comes out of necessity because one of my colleagues accidentally delete all my lab servers 🙂
For this post, I am using the latest vRSLM 1.3 and will be deploying a distributed vRA 7.4.
- jvra01 – vRA appliance with embedded vRO (recommended design to use embedded instead of external vRO since 7.3)
- jvra02 – vRA appliance with embedded vRO
- jvraweb01 – vRA IaaS Web
- jvraweb02 – vRA IaaS Web
- jvramgr01 – vRA IaaS Manager
- jvramgr02- vRA IaaS Manager
Since vSSLM automates and simplifies the deployment of your VMware SDDC stack, most of your time will be spent on prerequisites, so let’s start with that.
vRA prerequisites:
- Manually deploy 4 x vRA Iaas Windows Servers in your vCenter Server environment.
- Make sure they are added to the domain and DNS and NTP is working.
- Disable UAC on all Windows servers. Make sure to reboot if you have to disable this.
- Make sure that IPv6 is disabled on all Windows servers
- Add the windows service account as part of User Rights Assignment under Local Security Policies for Log on as a Service and Log on as a batch job on all windows machines.
- Verify the minimum resource requirements is set on all Windows servers. Set to at least 8GB.
- SQL Database
- Make sure the domain user has added the SQL server to the domain
- Make sure the domain user is added as part of the SQL DB user Logins list with the sysadmin privilege
- Load Balancer
- Make sure that the second member of each pool in the vRealize Automation load balancer is disabled.
There are also some scripts available to download to verify the prerequisites when you run the precheck for the creation of the vRA environment so this can be done later as well.
vRSLM prerequisites:
- Ensure that the vRSLCM appliance has correct FQDN configured
- Command for correcting the hostname is “/opt/vmware/share/vami/vami_set_hostname <hostname>”
- After setting the correct hostname, verify by using the command “hostname -f” or from 1.3 version of LCM, we can also verify from the settings page.
- Under vRSLM settings:
- Register with My VMware to access licenses, download Product Binaries, and consume Marketplace content.
- Download the vRealize Automation 7.4.0 product
- If you already have the OVA downloaded then you can import it under the Product binaries tab.
- Verify that you have vRealize Automation binaries status as completed.
- If you using a self-signed certificated in your environment (not recommended), then create a self-signed wildcard certificate for vRealize Suite product deployments.
- Best is to generate a single SAN certificate with all the product or management virtual host names or a wildcard certificate and provide this certificate when you create the environment for the first time. This ensures support for post provisioning actions such as Add Products and Scale Out.
- Configure NTP Servers for deploying products in environments
- Under Data Centers
- Create a Data Center with an associated location.
- Add the vCenter Server where the vRA environment will be deployed to.
- Make sure the data collection is successful.
JohannStander 