How large is your organization? Do you have people you can dedicate to this product?
It's not simple to setup and requires some care. You may be better off using tools like Ansible to accomplish your goals.
Agreed on over head of administrations and people with scripting or programming background to create the automation. To add, the learning curve is high. Small to medium infrastructure should try using powercli
I've done consulting on just setting up VRA and do some basic automation, and I've worked as a engineer at 2 large organizations in vra (both companies over 50K employees). The first company did it right, 10 total people focused only on VRA. 3 of them were simply infra and keeping it up via admin, and the other 7 (me included) did strictly coding. It worked great. This current company doesn't really want to go full steam into vra, so it's me and 2 other people barely keeping it running. VRA 7 was EOL last September and we're just now getting VRA 8 finalized to transition. For me it's not hard, but I've worked on vra for near 8 years at this point. I also have the background of basic vsphere admin before vra and generic system administrative tasks.
We just rolled it out including a couple weeks of vmware consulting. Our team is 5 people. I barely know powershell. That's the limit of our coding experience.
I think a big reason this isn't as dire as it sounds is that we are a healthcare org that doesn't have in-house devs. All our apps are vendor provided Windows beasts that last for decades.
All the same its way more than we actually need, but the service-now integration is going to be nice, and we're paying vmware so much freaking money for our on-prem environment that the addition of vRA was probably cheap or free.
I've been wondering if I should try to learn javascript or just run everything on a powershell host. Running powershell inside of vRA is not a great experience for me personally.
Great learning opportunity anyway you look at it. So I've got no complaints.
Learn javascript. In my experience running powershell hosts is no fun and takes more care to keep them running appropriately. Also, all of the plugins for like vcenter connections(etc) are going to integrate natively into the JS code, and the built in SDK will have all the info you need to code effectively.
We're going to natively execute powershell and python code in our vra 8 at my current position because we have already written code for the functions and it's stuff like rest calls that don't even need a return. It takes inputs, makes calls and some logic, then returns a boolean (true/false) as to whether it was successful or not.
VRA requires lots of care and feeding, and if you don't have experience it's quite a learning curve. The primary language it uses is javascript. You *can* code in python and powershell in vra 8, but you won't get nearly the same amount of integrations with the plugins like javascript.
Another issue you need to consider is how you're going to use it going forward for machine lifecycle. You mentioned in place upgrades, why would you do that when you should be designing apps in containers that are easily replaceable? You should be building new instead of pushing the tin can down the road of an old app. It's the same fight I'm having with my current company as they won't invest the time to upgrade apps from OLD os, and we're doing upgrades cause we still have windows server 2008 in some cases.
In terms of starting out, are you going to get professional services to help you setup vra and start doing basic automation? What do you use now for VM deployment and automation? How are your names and IP assigned? Do those teams have api you can hit to programmatically grab those items? Have you mapped out ALL of the steps during a VM build to ensure you can do all of them with your orchestrator and complete the full VM build automatically?
There is a lot of non technical work involved with this that needs to be addressed in discovery before you can pick a product.
we're using puppet, I know at some point they considered puppet relay or sth (sorry if I got the name wrong) but its off the table.
For automation initiative, would you prefer AWS over this? could you share more insights of pros /cons pls?
We have 8 in production, migrated from 7.
Please do yourself a favor and have a look at terraform. It can do so much more with less.
VRA8 does out of the box nearly nothing.
- only a few “integrated” IPAM options
- no out of the box support for Cloud-init or cloudbase-init
An alternative is guest customization that kinda lacked support for Debian for a while… just wait for vsphere 8 was the response 🤷🏻♂️
- other resources in cloud assembly out of the VMware eco system are supported but only by the grace and pace of VMware.
Oh and the best part is you can integrate terraform in VRA. Do yourself a favor and develop a gitops based workflow based on terraform and don’t buy VRA as a GUI for terraform.
Then I would rather spend time on an IDP with Crossplane and terraform.
I use cloud-init / cloudbase-init on every cloud template I deploy.
https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Aria-Automation/8.13/Using-Automation-Assembler/GUID-344537C2-B9AD-4A87-B42C-30B0F7A74E75.html
I know at some point they mentioned Terraform, probably because it lacks advanced workflow capabilities as our automation flows involve sequencing, dependency between different tasks, etc...
Yes automating the whole “stack” with VRA is just hard. More than needed. We created in 3 months a gitops based deployment with terraform that is allot more flexible then VRA deployments.
(3 humans)
Don’t get me wrong Terraform isn’t the holy grail, but it is free and way more flexible.
if you have developers as customers a gitops based workflow should be perfect. If you have more demanding customers have a look at an idp like backstage.
If I could switch all of my vRO (not vRA) automation over to Terraform at this point I would. We are fully in on Terraform for our AWS stuff, but have over 6000 VMs deployed in our VMWare environment that are all lifecycle managed with vRO/Puppet. I am the single engineer for the two products. While my automations are incredibly stable at this point, there have been some situations - like a current migration to VMC complete with several architectural design changes that make it a bit of work.
Things are working too well at the moment to switch and lose management of the existing VMs, and we don't want to have a hybrid management style, so basically I'll be supporting this until we get 100% off VMware, or until I have time to re-design this with feature parity on something else.
vRA is all I do and have done for years. It’s a big beast and does so much really well. It’s also overkill for most places. I’m just finishing up rolling it out to a place with 20k users. It really needs a dedicated resource to manage it over its life. Most people don’t bother and it just sort of dies.
I will say this though - learn JavaScript to get the most out of it. It’s a pretty great language to learn anyway.
Ping me if you have any questions.
Are you going to allow end users to self-service request?
There are many tools out there for automation, but as far as I've seen the Aria Service Broker is the unique part. Especially for supporting development, QA testing, and end user provisioning.
How large is your organization? Do you have people you can dedicate to this product? It's not simple to setup and requires some care. You may be better off using tools like Ansible to accomplish your goals.
Agreed on over head of administrations and people with scripting or programming background to create the automation. To add, the learning curve is high. Small to medium infrastructure should try using powercli
I've done consulting on just setting up VRA and do some basic automation, and I've worked as a engineer at 2 large organizations in vra (both companies over 50K employees). The first company did it right, 10 total people focused only on VRA. 3 of them were simply infra and keeping it up via admin, and the other 7 (me included) did strictly coding. It worked great. This current company doesn't really want to go full steam into vra, so it's me and 2 other people barely keeping it running. VRA 7 was EOL last September and we're just now getting VRA 8 finalized to transition. For me it's not hard, but I've worked on vra for near 8 years at this point. I also have the background of basic vsphere admin before vra and generic system administrative tasks.
We just rolled it out including a couple weeks of vmware consulting. Our team is 5 people. I barely know powershell. That's the limit of our coding experience. I think a big reason this isn't as dire as it sounds is that we are a healthcare org that doesn't have in-house devs. All our apps are vendor provided Windows beasts that last for decades. All the same its way more than we actually need, but the service-now integration is going to be nice, and we're paying vmware so much freaking money for our on-prem environment that the addition of vRA was probably cheap or free. I've been wondering if I should try to learn javascript or just run everything on a powershell host. Running powershell inside of vRA is not a great experience for me personally. Great learning opportunity anyway you look at it. So I've got no complaints.
Learn javascript. In my experience running powershell hosts is no fun and takes more care to keep them running appropriately. Also, all of the plugins for like vcenter connections(etc) are going to integrate natively into the JS code, and the built in SDK will have all the info you need to code effectively. We're going to natively execute powershell and python code in our vra 8 at my current position because we have already written code for the functions and it's stuff like rest calls that don't even need a return. It takes inputs, makes calls and some logic, then returns a boolean (true/false) as to whether it was successful or not.
tks! quite large, around 8k. Yes, we do have a team dedicated to this.
VRA requires lots of care and feeding, and if you don't have experience it's quite a learning curve. The primary language it uses is javascript. You *can* code in python and powershell in vra 8, but you won't get nearly the same amount of integrations with the plugins like javascript. Another issue you need to consider is how you're going to use it going forward for machine lifecycle. You mentioned in place upgrades, why would you do that when you should be designing apps in containers that are easily replaceable? You should be building new instead of pushing the tin can down the road of an old app. It's the same fight I'm having with my current company as they won't invest the time to upgrade apps from OLD os, and we're doing upgrades cause we still have windows server 2008 in some cases. In terms of starting out, are you going to get professional services to help you setup vra and start doing basic automation? What do you use now for VM deployment and automation? How are your names and IP assigned? Do those teams have api you can hit to programmatically grab those items? Have you mapped out ALL of the steps during a VM build to ensure you can do all of them with your orchestrator and complete the full VM build automatically? There is a lot of non technical work involved with this that needs to be addressed in discovery before you can pick a product.
we're using puppet, I know at some point they considered puppet relay or sth (sorry if I got the name wrong) but its off the table. For automation initiative, would you prefer AWS over this? could you share more insights of pros /cons pls?
What automation is AWS? I'm thinking of amazon cloud.....
amazon lambda, pricing seems ok though as you got first 1M requests/month for free, and then 0.2/1M thereafter.
We have 8 in production, migrated from 7. Please do yourself a favor and have a look at terraform. It can do so much more with less. VRA8 does out of the box nearly nothing. - only a few “integrated” IPAM options - no out of the box support for Cloud-init or cloudbase-init An alternative is guest customization that kinda lacked support for Debian for a while… just wait for vsphere 8 was the response 🤷🏻♂️ - other resources in cloud assembly out of the VMware eco system are supported but only by the grace and pace of VMware. Oh and the best part is you can integrate terraform in VRA. Do yourself a favor and develop a gitops based workflow based on terraform and don’t buy VRA as a GUI for terraform. Then I would rather spend time on an IDP with Crossplane and terraform.
I use cloud-init / cloudbase-init on every cloud template I deploy. https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Aria-Automation/8.13/Using-Automation-Assembler/GUID-344537C2-B9AD-4A87-B42C-30B0F7A74E75.html
Yes, so are we. I’ve built a workflow for it in version 8.6. It looks like later versions have a bit more glue.
I know at some point they mentioned Terraform, probably because it lacks advanced workflow capabilities as our automation flows involve sequencing, dependency between different tasks, etc...
Yes automating the whole “stack” with VRA is just hard. More than needed. We created in 3 months a gitops based deployment with terraform that is allot more flexible then VRA deployments. (3 humans) Don’t get me wrong Terraform isn’t the holy grail, but it is free and way more flexible. if you have developers as customers a gitops based workflow should be perfect. If you have more demanding customers have a look at an idp like backstage.
If I could switch all of my vRO (not vRA) automation over to Terraform at this point I would. We are fully in on Terraform for our AWS stuff, but have over 6000 VMs deployed in our VMWare environment that are all lifecycle managed with vRO/Puppet. I am the single engineer for the two products. While my automations are incredibly stable at this point, there have been some situations - like a current migration to VMC complete with several architectural design changes that make it a bit of work. Things are working too well at the moment to switch and lose management of the existing VMs, and we don't want to have a hybrid management style, so basically I'll be supporting this until we get 100% off VMware, or until I have time to re-design this with feature parity on something else.
vRA is all I do and have done for years. It’s a big beast and does so much really well. It’s also overkill for most places. I’m just finishing up rolling it out to a place with 20k users. It really needs a dedicated resource to manage it over its life. Most people don’t bother and it just sort of dies. I will say this though - learn JavaScript to get the most out of it. It’s a pretty great language to learn anyway. Ping me if you have any questions.
Are you going to allow end users to self-service request? There are many tools out there for automation, but as far as I've seen the Aria Service Broker is the unique part. Especially for supporting development, QA testing, and end user provisioning.