VMware vRealize Automation - Creating & Configuring Tenants Part 1

I have dedicated couple of blog posts earlier in vRealize Automation section wherein we discussed about Installation, Architecture, Roles and Layers, Creating blueprints, Custom properties and What's new with the latest releases.  Here are few links for quick reference vRealize Automation Installation Part 1, vRealize Automation Installation Part 2 , vRA Roles and Layers , vRealize Automation Architecture , Provisioning Machines in vRA , Multi Machine Blueprints , Custom Properties , and What's New in vRA7.

 

Recently did the fresh installation of vRA 7.0 in my Home Lab environment and added another tenant QA, synced users and also configured branding and created fabric groups so thought of dedicating a series of blog post which will serve as step by step guide for my reference and also help others to understand the procedure from creating a Tenant, configuring Branding, adding users, creating Fabric Groups, Creating machine prefixes and also talk about the creation of reservation policies, business groups.

*Note: Installation/Configurations/Specifications methods used here has been Tested in My Home Lab Nested Environment

The steps involved when creating/configuring a tenant is to access the default tenant (vSphere.local) and name the new Tenant/ Create a tenant specific URL and finally specify the users who can access the Tenant and can assign the Tenant and Administrator roles to the newly created users.

As shown in the above screenshot I logged in to my default tenant and created a new tenant  (QA) after providing some details including the Name of the new Tenant / Description/URL/Contact Email.  Next task on the list is to add local users and assigning them Tenant Administrators/ IaaS administrator roles and do some branding for our newly created tenant QA.

After the successful creation of my new tenant QA and giving the local users the IaaS administrator and Tenant Administrator roles it was time for me to access the newly created Tenant https://vRealize Automation Appliance FQDN /VCAC/ORG/Qa/Domain and do some Branding for the same. 

Wherein we have the option to customize the look and feel of the login screen including logo, background color and specify Header and Footer Settings.

Once the branding is done the next task on the list is to make use of Directory Management Feature to configure a link to Active Directory (Over LDAP) (Integrated Windows Authentication) to support user authentication. By Specifying Directory Name, FQDN of vRealize Automation Appliance,Domain Name, Domain Administrator Username/ Password.  Once the Directory is configured we can further go ahead and provide details including SYNC Settings, Group Information (Group DN's) to sync for example CN=users,DC=example,DC=company,DC=com, by selecting the Active Directory Groups that we want to Sync with the directory the users part of the groups are also synced. 

After we saved the directory configuration the next task on the list is to assign Tenant and IaaS administrator roles to the QA tenant, which will be done by connecting to the default tenant (vsphere.local) using the administrator account and editing the properties of QA tenant and then selecting the Administrators options.

Once we have added both the Tenant and IaaS administrator roles will be creating a Fabric Group and assigning Fabric Administrators, all these tasks will be performed using the IaaS admin role we have configured in our last step as IaaS admin is responsible for configuration of Infra Fabric by connecting various endpoints, and also for creation of Fabric Group/ Assignment of Fabric Admin role to a Fabric Group. 

Will be dedicating another article Part 2 of the series further explaining the steps involved for the creation of Fabric Groups,Machine Prefixes, Reservation Policies, Network Profiles, Business Groups and Reservations.

Vembu BDR Suite Free Edition

I have been associated with Vembu as a Blogger for more than two years and have seen some great enhancements in the overall product portfolio, be it the Vembu BDR Suite or Vembu Cloud Services there has been a lot of new features and functionalities that has been added in every release while working parallely with vendors and following their release cycle. I have already dedicated blogs covering some of these features and what’s new with Vembu BDR here is the link for your reference Vembu BDR Suite v3.9.0 is now GA.

Dedicated this article to talk about the New Vembu BDR Suite Free Edition which offers backup and recovery for both virtual and physical environment without any hidden costs. Vembu BDR Suites comes with a 30 days of free trial with no restriction in terms of available features and post 30 days we can opt out for free edition to continue using the features with some restrictions or we can purchase license as required.

Free VMware Backup

Suitable for those businesses, that do not have sophisticated data protection systems, Vembu VMBackup provides an exclusive Free Edition for VMware environments where the user can take unlimited agentless VMware Backup hosted in VMware ESXi host (6.5, 6.0,5.5,5.1) and vCenter server (6.5, 6.0, 5.5, 5.1 and 5.0) at zero cost. It also Supports multiple VMware transport modes like Direct SAN, HotAdd and Network based (NBD & NBDSSL). VMBackup automatically analyses and chooses the appropriate transport mode to improve the VM data transfer rate.

Free Hyper-V Backup

Vembu offers free Hyper-V backup using their proprietary driver to protect the production VMs running on the Hyper-V environments (Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V 2016, 2012 R2, 2012 and 2008 R2) by taking consistent snapshots of the VMs having highly transactional applications like Exchange, SQL, Active Directory and SharePoint using Microsoft VSS writer and truncate the transaction log files during the backup job.

Free Windows Servers Backup

Vembu’s Free Windows Server Backup will protect the entire Windows Servers machine including operating system, applications and data at zero cost. Vembu ImageBackup uses application-aware technology to take a consistent backup of the windows server machine running the Microsoft application like Exchange, SQL Database, Active Directory and SharePoint.

Free Windows Workstations Backup

Vembu Image Backup offers comprehensive Backup and Disaster Recovery solution for Windows Desktops and Laptops at FREE of cost. It backs up entire system image or individual volumes of Windows Desktops and Laptops. During system crash or any major disaster, Bare-metal Recovery (BMR) helps to recover the backed up Windows machines into same or different hardware.

Free File Backup of Workstations

Backing up workstations is as important as backing up a server ,Data loss in a business may happen due to any of the reasons like system crash, hard disk corruption, power interruption, improper shutdown, accidental file deletion,A data loss in these workstations may badly affect the productivity of a business. Vembu File Backup of workstations using Vembu Network Backup can help to backup unlimited files, folders and applications of the workstations with no restriction on size of files and folders.

Free Vembu Universal Explorer

Vembu Universal Explorer instantly recover the individual Microsoft application items from the backed up data. Be it physical or virtual machine data, Vembu Universal Explorer recovers application items from Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, SQL and Active Directory without restoring the entire VM backup and disk image backup. Vembu has turned down all the difficulties faced by an IT administrator in restoring the Microsoft applications and related items through Vembu Universal Explorer. It provides an easy-to-use and intuitive UI, so the user can browse the required application items easily from the backed up data without any complication and restore to live application servers or download them into specific formats.

Free Vembu Recovery CD

Vembu Recovery CD eases up Bare-metal Recovery process by restoring the backed up image data of the source disk or partition to the same or new hardware. The backed up image data of a physical or virtual machine stored in BDR server can be restored to a physical machine by using Recover entire disk or a partition option from the Vembu Recovery CD. This can be done by downloading the virtual disk file (VHD/VHDX) and configuration file of the backup from the BDR backup server and restoring them through Vembu Recovery CD.