Update: Since its initial launch, VMware vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) has been renamed Aria Automation Orchestrator, and as of January 2024, it has been integrated into VMware Cloud Foundation Automation. It is no longer available as a standalone product.

vRO is the latest version of the Orchestrator product that VMware first shipped with vSphere 4. Many new VMware users usually struggle to understand how this handy workflow automation tool fits into the VMware matrix. And that’s not surprising.

Today, we’ll go over some of the things you need to know about the vRO automation tool.

1. Executes and Monitors Workflows

vRO allows users and systems to monitor and execute workflows. It does this by providing a library of workflows that execute the tasks based on best practices. You can also run workflows externally using PowerShell Script, Python, SNMP, VMware vRealize Automation, vSphere Web Client, and VMware Solution Exchange.

2. Helps with Task Automation

vRO helps with the automation of the management and operational tasks of VMware and third-party applications. These applications include change management database systems, service desks, IPAM, DHCP, DNS, Storage Management, and Load Balancers.

3. Supports Modular Programming

vRO supports modular programming. Modular programming helps users to separate the functionality of a program into interchangeable modules. Each module now contains the necessary code to execute only one aspect of the entire program’s functionality. Modular programming ensures code modifiability, debuggability, and reliability.

4. vRO Has Three Layers

vRO has three layers. They include:

• Orchestration Platform – All the features required in an orchestration tool reside here.
• Plug-in Architecture – This uses the orchestration layer to access external systems and applications.
• Workflow Library – This vRO layer contains prebuilt workflows created and executed with the workflow engine’s help.

5. vRO Comes with an Integrated Development Environment (IDE)

You can create workflows using the vRO IDE. The IDE provides access to the Workflow Library and other functional components for building workflows. When you’re creating workflows using the workflow editor, you don’t need to write code. You only need to know what each component does and what information you need to provide to execute the workflow.

6. The Orchestrator Comes as a Preconfigured Appliance

The orchestration service of vRO automatically starts after you’ve deployed the tool. But you can increase the scalability and availability by installing and configuring a database and a load balancer. This helps to distribute workloads between several orchestration servers. 

After you’ve downloaded the server component, you can now install the Orchestrator client. This client provides different views depending on the perspective (Administer, Run, and Design).

7. vRO Requires Some Prerequisites to Run

To run the Orchestrator, make sure the VMware vCenter Server service is running. The ESXi host you’ve selected for deployment should meet the minimum recommended hardware requirements. Remember to change the expiration date of the root password. The system usually sets the date at 365 days. You’ll need to log in as a root user to make the changes.

8. Using the Control Center

After you’ve installed vRO, you can use the control center on your web browser to make changes. You can manage users, import and export configurations, configure workflows, and access log files. The control center service usually stops by default. You have to start it using the root account.

Conclusion

The vRO automation tool helps organizations automate complex tasks. It can help reduce cloud OpEx (operating expenses) and increase the extensibility of your deployment.

See how CloudBolt can help you get the most out of VMware.

It goes without saying: the world has changed a lot in the last 18 months. For organizations, it has meant that agility is the name of the game.

IT operations within enterprises have responded accordingly, adopting DevOps practices to develop and deliver IT services more quickly and more efficiently – without sacrificing quality. Practices such as continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) have gained traction to help developers rapidly deliver code changes via an automated pipeline.

A successful CI/CD pipeline requires high levels of automation and a flexible infrastructure. That’s why more development teams are adopting Infrastructure-as-Code as well, but we’ll discuss that more in the future.

CI/CD has evolved to the point where it is now widely accepted as the optimal approach for modern application development and deployment. Even though the concepts behind CI/CD have been around for decades, most organizations are still early on their journey. We took a closer look at this in our new CloudBolt Industry Insights (CII) report, The Truth About DevOps in the Hybrid Cloud Journey.

Leveraging Pulse Research’s proprietary platform and audience between May 7 and June 10, 2021, CloudBolt secured 200+ responses from senior titles (74% VP+) at large companies (>1,000 employees) around the world who had specific knowledge of IaC and CI/CD within their organizations.

Where CI/CD Falls on the Hybrid Cloud Landscape

Here are some of the key takeaways on the CI/CD portion of the survey:

• 76% of organizations say their CI/CD maturity level is intermediate. Only 3.5% consider their maturity level “expert” (with most of those being at the largest enterprises).
• Only 5% of companies surveyed indicated they deploy applications multiple times daily.
• Most companies (85%) admit to deploying on a weekly or even monthly basis.
• CI/CD pipelines remains less than instantaneous or continuous, with 70% saying that pipeline deployment on average takes days/weeks/or longer.
• While 97% of respondents agree that testing CI/CD infrastructure is important and 85% claim to regularly test that infrastructure, only 11% of companies actually believe their CI/CD infrastructure is very reliable. 69% characterize it as only somewhat reliable, and fully 21% say theirs is somewhat unreliable or not reliable at all.
• 63% say there are too many manual processes involved when setting pipeline infrastructure.

As for what is needed to improve the situation with CI/CD, more than half said they wanted to make provisioning infrastructure faster through automated processes, continuously detect
infrastructure issues to reduce testing challenges & failures, and simplify remediation of infrastructure issues proactively.

We’re here to help you anywhere on your hybrid and multi-cloud journey. Request a demo today.

Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!

Here are the blogs we’ve posted this week:

• Going Deeper Than the Surface on Cloud Difficulties 

With that, onto this week’s news:

How FinOps can rein in cloud costs

Aaron Tan, TechTarget, March 2, 2022

“With half of key IT spending expected to shift to cloud in the next three years, organisations will need to get a better handle on cloud cost management to make sure their cloud spending continues to deliver business outcomes. According to the FinOps Foundation’s latest State of FinOps survey, North America leads the world with the most FinOps practitioners, followed by Europe and the Middle East. In Asia, the number of FinOps practitioners accounted for about 7.8% of total respondents. 

Cloud service providers have also started to invest in FinOps by providing cloud financial management tools on their platforms, while technology consulting firms have set up FinOps practices to drive the cultural change – such as involving engineers in cost optimisation – and governance needed to reap its benefits. The FinOps lifecycle comprises three phases, starting with the inform phase, which provides visibility into who procured a cloud service, why it was procured and what it is used for, so that the person responsible for the workload is aware of the cost and usage of a cloud service.”

The Primary Reasons Digital Transformation Efforts Fail

Rob Enderle, Datamation, Feb. 25, 2022

“It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the pandemic has driven a massive acceleration toward digital technology that can, and is, being used to reduce vulnerable employee load and increase remote employee capabilities. With 90% of respondents showcasing this acceleration, I wonder more how the 10% who didn’t accelerate will survive in the post-pandemic world. Companies optimizing machine learning (ML)/artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) were only 48%, suggesting most respondents aren’t acting quickly enough. And in a few short years, as often happens when you are having an industrial revolution, they will likely fail or become uncompetitive. Digital transformation, when done right, can be a massive force multiplier.

However, on the negative side, the barriers to adoption are significant, suggesting many attempting to do digital transformation poorly may be in worse shape than companies that aren’t trying to do it at all.  As with all major transformations, this report also showcases a significant problem with the skills/knowledge gap and poor data analysis: 44% of respondents highlighted this skills gap as a significant problem; and 39% reported a lack of infrastructure optimization and inadequate data analysis. This report, unlike others I’ve seen in the past, doesn’t suggest that digital acceleration efforts are pointless. They do clearly have value. But that value can’t be achieved if speed is prioritized over quality, which seems to be the problem with around half of the companies sampled. We need to make sure any major company transformation is properly founded with adequate training. In the end, digital transformation will be critical to the success of most companies, but only if they lay a proper foundation and execute quickly after the best direction has been properly identified.”  

Use the cloud to strengthen your supply chain

David Lithincum, InfoWorld, Feb. 25, 2022

“When will the supply chains get better? According to a survey from The Wall Street Journal, about 45% of economists believe that it will take until the second half of 2022. As I researched supply chain data, we seem to be at about the same level of supply chain efficiency as last year, in 2021, which is not good. Although the supply chain disruptions have been caused by several issues, including the pandemic, labor shortages in trucking and other industries, and availability of raw materials, the little-known secret is that supply chain and logistics systems have just not been up to the task of dealing with these anomalies.

I’m seeing a few companies that have leveraged cloud computing as a critical weapon against many of these issues. Best I can tell, less than 5% of the companies that depend on supply chains for their revenue have taken steps to put these systems in place. In many instances, the systems must be customized for a specific company, and that means even more cost and risk.

The rise of industry clouds may change some of this. Indeed, it won’t take long for the public cloud providers to adopt and provide these types of services. Those who wish to gain this advantage will just use the services from the public cloud providers and not have to build their own. So, the next time you deal with a company that is indeed able to deliver as promised no matter what the market conditions are, see if they are leveraging cloud computing as a core innovative platform to set them apart when the markets become difficult. Who do you want to do business with?”

Discover how a framework can transform your enterprise cloud strategy. Request a demo today.

Sometimes, things just aren’t as they appear.

That’s part of why we created CloudBolt Industry Insights (CII), and was the real driving force behind our latest survey “Hitting a Wall in a Multi-Cloud, Multi-Tool World.” We wanted to get at the heart of the real issues we saw cropping up across the market: that practitioners of cloud were inundated with tools, platforms, processes, new and emerging ways to develop and achieve digital business goals, sprawl across multiple clouds and geolocations, etc.

All this was leading to an inevitable truth: that what looked like a lot of great options and developments for purveyors of tech seemed good on the surface, but was actually causing problems that were not easy to see at first.

Everything Looked Good on the Surface

Early in the survey, when asked questions about how things were going with their cloud efforts and digital transformation, respondents seemed to give push back. “We got this,” and “all is well” seemed to surround the responses.

When asked about progress against original drivers for moving to the cloud, more than half of all respondents said they had mostly or fully achieved:

• enterprise acceleration
• digital transformation
• cost reduction
• enterprise agility

Furthermore, 78% believed they had achieved cost savings using cloud versus their old data centers. 75% said infrastructure automation was a first-class executive-level metric in their organization to continuously monitor cloud cost and efficiency, and 63% insisted it was easy or very easy to view all cloud spend and accurately assign costs. Lastly, 67% said it was easy to provision cloud resources without having to be an expert.

Had we ended the study using only the answers to questions #1-7, we would have been led to believe that cloud nirvana was near and all the world’s cloud complexities had been solved. But that’s when things took a turn toward the truth…

Tag – You’re It

A clear measure of how well a company accurately tracks and assigns cloud costs is how well they employ “tagging” (metadata labels assigned to cloud resources to know exactly who provisioned what and why). Tagging also allows administrators to set policies around users or roles and access rights. For tagging to be effective, it needs to be done consistently.

So, the first “real truth of the situation” started to appear when only 9% of respondents said they always employ tagging. 73% said they “sometimes used tagging.

Tagging only part of the time is little more effective than rarely tagging because only occasionally tagging still forces people to hunt down information and degrades true cloud cost/efficiency visibility. Maybe things weren’t all rainbow and unicorns in paradise?

Uncovering Reality

The second half of the study was much more eye-opening. For questions #9-15, the structure shifted to simple statements around specific aspects of cloud suspected to be areas of high friction or difficulty. Respondents were asked to read specific statements and then indicate whether they:

• strongly agree
• agree
• neither agree nor disagree
• disagree
• strongly disagree.

It was as if guards were lowered at this point and respondents exposed their key areas of concern. We’ll get into what those areas are in our next post.

Discover more about these findings, the challenges presented by the Wall for multi-cloud, multi-tool strategies, and how your enterprise can vault over it.

Read the CloudBolt Industry Insights Report: Hitting a Wall in a Multi-Cloud, Multi-Tool World now.

Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!

Here are the blogs we’ve posted this week:

• VMware vRealize Automation Crash Course

With that, onto this week’s news:

4 Trends Shaping Cloud in 2022

Deloitte, Wall Street Journal, Feb. 15, 2022

“Cloud technology has evolved enormously in recent years, giving enterprises virtually limitless opportunities to rethink and transform their businesses. In 2022, that rapid pace of change promises to continue. Federated containers, an acute skills crunch, edge computing, and cost governance are all likely to be defining themes for cloud computing in the upcoming year, and it’s up to enterprises to navigate the resulting landscape, with all its opportunities and challenges. In a recent podcast, Deloitte Consulting LLP’s David Linthicum, managing director and chief cloud strategy officer, and Mike Kavis, managing director and chief cloud architect, discuss these and other trends shaping the cloudscape in 2022.

Finally, it’s been an ongoing problem that many companies leveraging cloud don’t have good visibility into usage tracking or the resulting costs incurred. 2022 may be the year when a solution begins to take hold. Automation and FinOps—uniting technology, finance, and the business through systems and processes focused on maximizing the value of the cloud—will likely play a key role. ‘Cost governance can be a competitive advantage,’ Linthicum says. ‘You can then track everything down to the bottom line and make sure nothing is taking revenue away from the business.’” 

Will Hybrid Cloud Save You Money? Predict Your Hybrid Cloud Costs

Christopher Tozzi, ITProToday, Feb. 15, 2022

“Alongside benefits such as greater flexibility and control, potential cost savings are often touted as a reason to consider using a hybrid cloud architecture. But the keyword there is ‘potential.’ Whether hybrid cloud actually saves money as compared with your current setup (which could be a public cloud or a fully on-premises environment) depends on factors such as which workloads you need to run and how you plan to design and operate your hybrid cloud. 

A hybrid setup can potentially lower your total IT operations bill in several respects:

• Greater choice: By allowing businesses to take advantage of public cloud services and infrastructure where they make sense, while keeping other workloads on private infrastructure, hybrid cloud makes it easier to strike the best balance between cost and performance.
• Keep using existing infrastructure: If you run everything in the public cloud, the value of any private infrastructure that you already own goes out the window. By using a hybrid architecture, you can keep leveraging the investment you’ve already made in on-premises servers and other equipment.
• Avoid refactoring: Although you don’t necessarily need to refactor legacy applications to run them in the public cloud, some workloads may require significant changes. A hybrid model makes it easier in some cases to keep running legacy workloads in their current state, without spending engineering resources to move them to the public cloud. It’s worth noting, though, that some workloads may need refactoring even to run in the private portion of a hybrid cloud.
• Compliance savings: In some situations, keeping data on-premises using a hybrid cloud architecture makes it easier not just to demonstrate compliance, but also to manage compliance. In this respect, hybrid cloud can reduce expenses associated with enforcing compliance requirements.
• Avoid egress fees: When used strategically, hybrid cloud architectures can reduce the amount of data you have to move between the public cloud and on-premises locations. Since public clouds charge egress fees for data movement, reducing data transfers leads to a lower total cloud computing cost.”

We’re here to help you anywhere on your hybrid and multi-cloud journey. Request a demo today.

VMware vRealize Automation, currently at version 8.6, is part of VMware’s vRealize Suite. The vRealize Suite includes a variety of software solutions aimed at operations, automation, orchestration, and cloud.

It’s no secret that eliminating complex manual processes reduces tech debt, decreases the likelihood of human error, and improves IT efficiency. However, when it comes to building private cloud solutions and integrating public and private cloud platforms the level of customization and complexity required often leads to IT using manual processes they’d prefer to avoid.

A Crash Course in vRA

In VMware environments, vRealize Automation (vRA) infrastructure automation helps solve this problem. In this article, to help you get the most out of this automation tool, we’ll review the platform in-depth, explore what’s changed in vRA 8, and walk through the deployment process so you can get hands-on with vRA.

vRA also provides mechanisms for extensibility and integration into and between third-party infrastructure and application management tools and public cloud platforms such as AWS and Azure.

The different vRA capabilities can be categorized as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), IT as a Service (ITaaS), and Anything as a Service (XaaS).

Reducing complexity with vRA 8 Architecture

VMware recognized that vRA’s complexity needed to be addressed, and they did just that with vRA 8.

In many ways, vRA 8 is a different product operating under the same name. Legacy code is gone and the architecture and APIs have undergone a complete overhaul. For example, there are no more Windows Operating system dependencies, freeing up license costs and avoiding vendor lock-in. Additionally, the new architecture is streamlined and consists of far fewer components.

vRA 8 is containerized

To provide high availability while maintaining simplicity, VMware containerized the various vRealize Automation services. Docker is used to physically run the services as containers via Helm, while a special self-deployed and self-managed distribution of Kubernetes orchestrates and provides service availability and accessibility.

Get the full crash court on vRA, including a brief history of the offering, best practices, common misconceptions, and a configuration walkthrough in this article that’s part of our Complete Guide to VMware Administration.

Discover how we can help you make the most of your VMware environment. Talk to us today.

Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!

Here are the blogs we’ve posted this week:

• A Better Way for CI/CD Tools and Processes

With that, onto this week’s news:

One significant cost of multicloud 

Matt Asay, InfoWorld, Feb. 9, 2022

“Your CEO may have proclaimed your company is ‘all in’ on cloud provider X at its recent event, but don’t be fooled. Your organization is irredeemably multicloud. How do I know? Because every enterprise of even moderate size is multicloud by accident if not by design. That’s just how enterprise IT works, and it’s why I’ve suggested that learning a second cloud, like learning a second language, can be great for your career. And yet, multicloud comes with costs. As such, as former AWS executive Tim Bray recently wrote, the best cloud strategy is whatever makes your people most productive. Hint: That may well involve standardizing as much as possible on a single cloud provider. But that’s aspirational.

Today you’re running services from multiple clouds. The CIO may not think so, but with the spread of open source in years past, the CIO is not in the best position to know all that’s going on within the enterprise. Developers, pushed to deliver applications and infrastructure at ever-increasing velocity, are going to use whatever contributes most toward that goal. Yes, companies may choose to go multicloud or end up there despite their best intentions. Even so, he stresses, it pays to ‘go all in on a public cloud platform and use the highest-level serverless tools as much as possible’ because ‘every time you reduce the labor around instance counts and pod sizes and table space and file descriptors and patch levels, you’ve just increased the proportion of your hard-won recruiting wins that go into delivery of business-critical, customer-visible features.’ In other words, the less time your developers need to spend figuring out the ins and outs of different clouds, the more time they can spend innovating on your customers’ behalf.”

Housing your big data in the cloud: Multicloud, hybrid cloud or on-premises? How to decide

Mary Shacklett, TechRepublic, Feb. 7, 2022

“If companies store and access their big data onsite, the processing and storage costs can be substantial, but the ability to access and query this data is faster than it would be in the cloud. Conversely, cloud big data processing and storage offers scalability, no investments in on-premises infrastructure, and security and management options that are almost as good as you’d have onsite, provided IT enacts the same policies and procedures in cloud operations as it does onsite. The catch is that these big data management policies and procedures might not be as enacted by IT in the cloud as they are on-prem. This makes it essential that organizations set strategies and practices for cloud-based big data management. What types of strategies should be considered for big data in the cloud? 

While it’s easy to see the pros and cons of private versus public clouds, deciding when to use multiple clouds or a hybrid cloud concept is far more complex. It requires careful thought over how you will use your big data, exercise governance and coordinate data, and how you will process data and enforce security across multiple clouds. Because cloud big data needs and architecture design can be highly complex, defining the big data cloud architecture should be the first task on a big data cloud strategy list.”

We’re here to help you anywhere on your hybrid and multi-cloud journey. Request a demo today.

Recently, we’ve shared information in this space about why Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery, or CI/CD, is critical to the modern enterprise, and the four challenges presented by CI/CD tools and processes. Now, we’re excited to share more with you about how CloudBolt Software approaches addressing the concerns of enterprises with CI/CD implementations.