vCAC: Playing Around

I have for a while wanted to write a bit about vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) or, if you haven’t heard, as it will be rebranded vRealize Automation (vRA). My organization upgraded to vCloud Suite Standard licenses 2 years ago during the promo so we have access to the Standard edition of vCAC.

 

So what would it be able to do for us? We have been looking at providing some kind of private cloud solution to users but the form and shape of this has yet to be defined. So for the moment I am just testing out what I can do, how it is done, how to configure access and the likes. So far I am impressed but still a bit confused between tenants, fabric and business groups, reservations, entitlements, catalogs etc etc etc.

 

What I have learned so far from fooling around are:

  1. Native AD support is only available on the default “vsphere.local” tenant for some reason. Meaning if you want to use a different tenant for your AD you need to define each domain in your AD forest to be able to use users from all domains. A bit impractical.
  2. Renaming a cluster under vCenter that has been added as a compute resource in vCAC causes odd problems. Suddenly my tests were giving: Failed “CloneVM: Object reference is not set to an instance of an object”. I was unable to find anything else. Thinking my template had moved I started data collection on the compute resouce again. This failed with no error message to be found. Then I remembered that I had renamed the cluster. Solution was to remove reservations and then the cluster from the Fabric Group and then add the new name, recreate the reservation and then I was able to go again 🙂
  3. Adding users to a business group as users don’t give access to the actual resources. You need to entitle them which to me seems a bit redundant. Perhaps I have not yet seen the light on why this is smart.

 

I wil hopefully write more at a later time about this. My next goal is to get vCO running as an endpoint but due to some odd login problems with vCO 5.5.2.1 I can’t use my vCO at the moment!