The vRealize Automation appliance is installed on Photon OS since verion 8.0. It includes native Kubernetes to host containerized services.The vRA services run as Docker containers in Kubernetes pods. Each Kubernetes pod hosts one or more containers. Examples of vRA containerized services are:
- RabbitMQ is the industry-standard message bus used in vRealize Automation.
- The vRA database is a PostgreSQL database which runs as a pod and uses a Persistent Volume (PV) to store data.
- The vRealize Orchestrator service runs as a pod hosting two key containers, the control center (manages operations of vRO and plugins) and the vco-server (the orchestration engine).
Another basic container concept is a Namespace. Namespaces are a way to divide Kubernetes cluster resources between multiple users.
As you can see, vRA has many components. Of course, they can fail and some knowledge is required to troubleshoot these scenarios.