vRealize Automation 8 – Identifying Important Gaps in Features, Functionalities, and Integrations (Part 2 of 2)

Limited XaaS Functionality in vRA 8.0

I want to start off by mentioning that VMware is listing Anything as a Service (XaaS) as being “built in” to vRA 8.0. The current implementation of XaaS in vRA8 is only a subset of the functionality that is available in vRA7. In the second part of this series (post 1 is available here) I am going to point out the major differences in XaaS functionality between vRA7 and vRA8.

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vRealize Automation 8 – A First Look at the vRA8 Migration Assessment Tool – Part 2 of 2

Article by Sid Smith

In Part 1 of this two-part series on the vRealize Automation Migration Assessment Tool, we looked at the vRA8 migration tool to see how it might help you plan your migration from vRA7 to vRA8.  In this article, we are going to look at what it will take to migrate your custom workflows from vRA7 to vRA8.  To start, we will explore what a custom workflow looks like to day in vRA7.

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vRA 8 – My First Extensibility Workflow – vRO Edition

As I’m going through trying to wrap my head around the new constructs available in vRA 8, I will be documenting my findings on my blog. This particular article surrounds setting up a very basic vRO workflow to execute at the “Compute Allocation” state. I will be walking through everything required to be able to get it to work from basic workflow setup, to include the input and output formats as well as the Event Subscription setup and execution. This very basic workflow is very simple in nature, I will modify a few tags and custom properties and return them back to the request.

I also have a second post addressing vRA 8 extensibility using Action Based Extensibility (ABX) available here.

A VMware Admin’s First Impressions of vRealize Automation 8 (vRA8) – Part 2 of 2

Welcome to Part 2 of 2 of our “First Impressions” of vRA8 article. In Part 1, we discussed what’s new, good, not so good, and really good about Documentation and Tagging in vRA8. Below, we discuss orchestration and extensibility, as well as policies, which are both very new and very different in vRA8.

A VMware Admin’s First Impressions of vRealize Automation 8 (vRA8) – Part 1 of 2

Many of us have been eager to get our hands on vRealize Automation 8 (vRA8) for some time now. If any of you are like me, you may have dabbled in the Hands On Labs with vRealize Automation Cloud (formerly CAS) for the past year. But, without having the capability or the requisite login for the service, you kept abreast of any updates coming out of the vRAC camp. I have been through quite a few versions, upgrades, migrations and code changes in my time working with the vRealize products. Most of this experience was spent in architecture, engineering, and development at a large enterprise customer, where we had to carefully navigate each of these changes. This article covers some of my first impressions of vRA8 as an advanced user of the product since the early days, circa vRA6.