Blog – Page 8 – Adrian Heißler

Setting up a multi-cloud deployments in Aria Automation Assembler

On May 17, 2023

Recently, I wanted to demonstrate Aria Automation’s multi-cloud capabilities. Therefore I wanted to use the official tutorial available on the VMware documentation web site as a basis (https://docs.vmware.com/en/vRealize-Automation/8.11/Using-and-Managing-Cloud-Assembly/GUID-6EC5AFE5-3C18-4F68-A7E3-82ADD4490002.html). In this tutorial we deploy the same cloud template to more than one cloud provider, in this case AWS and Microsoft Azure.

Setting up the infrastructure on AWS and Azure (labeled “part 1” in the official tutorial) works as described there (except that you have to select other image mappings), also the creation of the Aria Automation example project (labeled “part 2” in the official tutorial) works as described, but I had problems with the Automation Assembler templates to deploy the basic cloud template and the expanded cloud template (labeled “part 3” in the official tutorial).

Thus I’ve played around a bit and came up with two working cloud templates.

Customizing a vSphere VM guest OS using Aria Automation cloudConfig

By Adrian

On April 29, 2023

In VMware

We can install a guest operating system in a VM and control guest operating system customisation for VMs by either running commands directly or, if deploying to vSphere-based cloud platforms, through customisation specifications.

In Aria Automation these commands are defined in a so-called cloudConfig resource property in the cloud template code which holds the commands that should be run. For customisation specifications on the other hand, a property in the cloud template code references a vSphere customisation specification by name.

In this post I’m going to show how to leverage Aria Automation cloudConfig to customise Ubuntu 22 and Windows Server 2022 VMs. Such customisation could include:

Set the hostname
Set the timezone
Configure the network adapter
Partition, format, mount hard disks
Run arbitrary commands (e.g. join a domain)

Consuming the NSX-T API with Aria Automation and Orchestrator

By Adrian

On March 17, 2023

In VMware

Recently, I was asked by a customer to deploy a custom NSX-T firewalling solution for their virtual machines, where virtual machines owned by an Aria Automation user are allowed to communicate with virtual machines of the same user. The solution leverages NSX-T firewall rules based on groups, where the group membership is defined based on NSX-T tags attached to a virtual machine.

To achieve the custom tagging of virtual machines in NSX-T during the VM deployment phase in Aria Automation, I developed a Orchestrator workflow leveraging the capabilities of the NSX-T API.

In this blog post, I’ll demonstrate how to use the NSX-T API from Orchestrator.

Announcing Build Tools for VMware Aria: DevOps…

By Adrian

On March 5, 2023

In VMware

Announcing Build Tools for VMware Aria: DevOps…

Build Tools for VMware Aria originated as an internal VMware project. It is used by delivery teams to develop, test, and deploy customer automation solutions based on products that are part of VMware Aria Suite… Continued here.

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Howto customize the Aria Automation landing page

By Adrian

On February 25, 2023

In VMware

There are two options to customize Aria Automation start page:

Common title, and landing page title and content
Image

To change the title and content text, we login the Aria Auto VA using the root account.

Then we navigate into the folder /opt/tarballs/landing-ui/assets/i18n, where a couple of language files are stored in JSON format, e.g. en.json.

Simply adjust the content of these files as required and save each file.

To change the image on the landing page, we again login the Aria Auto VA using the root account.

Then we navigate into the folder /opt/tarballs/landing-ui/assets/img, where the landing page image is stored in SVG format. You can upload your own SVG file here, it must be called welcome-intro-01.svg and saved with file system permissions of 664.

Both actions must be performed on all nodes in a cluster. No restart of any service is required.