If you run VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 nested in a homelab, VCF Automation (VCFA) is the appliance that will make your host fans spin. It ships as a single “one size fits all” deployment sized at a minimum of 24 vCPU + 96 GB RAM, and internally it’s a full Kubernetes platform. Drop that onto a modest nested host and you’ll see high CPU, contention, and – if you start “optimizing” the wrong things like me – a spectacular cascade of failures. In this blog I’ll describe my journey to get a stable and performing VCFA appliance in my homelab.
Tag: Aria Automation Page 1 of 5
In my previous blog post, I mapped out the service runtime and the army of pods that make up the prelude namespace in VCF Automation 9.1, and covered how to get a shell on the runtime. Today I put that to work on a real problem, and dig into one of the most interesting pods in the namespace.
Recently, I had a customer, where I needed to get detailed logs why a user login into a VCFA tenant organization didn’t work. There’s no button in the UI for “explain why this login failed,” so the only way forward was to get onto the box that runs Automation, find the right service, and read its logs. That service is the so-called tenant-manager.
If you’ve moved to VCF Automation 9 and gone looking for the old Aria Automation 8.x style standalone appliance you used to SSH into, you’ll have noticed that it is now a fleet-level component on a dedicated VCF services runtime, lifecycle-managed by VCF Operations. And the product does substantially more than either predecessor, i.e. it merged Aria Automation’s automation/self-service with VMware Cloud Director’s tenancy, and added cloud-native (VKS/container) consumption. Which is a lot of moving parts consolidated into one place – and it is not obvious where everything now runs. So I sat down and mapped it out in this short blog post.
Following up my last post about the creation and configuration of an all-apps organization, we now exploring how to actually deploy traditional and modern workloads in this organization.
In this post I’ll show how to deploy a Linux virtual machine using the VKS VM Service and a Kubernetes Guest Cluster. Finally we will deploy the popular retro game Doom in this cluster and access it via a VNC client through an external IP address.
In this lab, I’ll show you how to request a deployment from a catalog item. This catalog item has a custom form with an Aria Orchestrator action to dynamically populate drop down menu values based on a value provided by another drop down value.
To do so, you make a POST request with a project ID that has a cloud template version released to the project. The request body includes the ID of the catalog item from which you are requesting the deployment, and the version of the released cloud template.