VMware vRealize Automation is part of the VMware vRealize Suite. Also referred to as vRA, it allows you to create and manage your private cloud without the need for complex manual processes. It’s an automation tool for the private cloud. The tool also supports hybrid cloud models where you can integrate your private cloud with the public cloud.
vRA allows you to deploy services in your private vSphere cloud. With vRA, admins, developers, and users can request services and manage resources without going against business policies. It processes requests through a common service catalog to give a consistent user experience.
What are the Benefits of vRA?(VMware vRealize Automation)
- Agility
vRA can help you automate the delivery of IT services. This includes infrastructure, applications, desktop, and any custom services. This automation allows you to rapidly respond to changing business needs.
- Control
You can put in place personalized and relevant policies to enforce deployment standards, service levels, and resource quotas.
- Choice
With vRA, you get a wide selection of multi-cloud, multi-vendor support, and extensible design.
- Efficiency
You get to lower costs while improving IT service delivery.
What Does vRA Deliver?
Using vRealize Automation helps to accelerate the management and deployment of compute services and applications.
The following capabilities can empower your IT department to quickly demonstrate the value of deploying automated, on-demand cloud infrastructure:
- Governance
IT admins can apply their own ways of doing business to their cloud environments without making changes to organizational policies or processes. Enterprises get the flexibility they need for various business units to have different policies, automation processes, and service levels.
- Provisioning and Management
You can accelerate application deployment in your organization by eliminating duplication of work and streamlining the deployment process. You can do this by using blueprints and reusable components.
- Life Cycle Management and Infrastructure Delivery
vRA helps organizations to automate the deployment of multi-vendor infrastructures. It helps break down internal organizational silos that act as roadblocks to efficient IT service delivery.
- Extensible
vRA provides extensibility. This empowers IT personnel to adapt, enable, and extend the cloud to work with existing IT infrastructure and processes. This, in turn, eliminates costly service agreements and reduces risk.
Components of vRealize Automation
1. VMware vRealize Automation: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
VMware vRealize Automation consists of one or more Windows servers that work in tandem to provision and model systems in public, private, and hybrid cloud setups. You can install IaaS on either physical or virtual Windows servers. The following components make up Infrastructure as a Service:
- Agents
vRealize IaaS relies on agents to manage information among vRA components and integrate with external systems. The agents include Virtual Proxy, External Provisioning Integration, Virtual Desktop Integration, and Windows Management Instrumentation agents. Each agent has a function.
- Web Server
Infrastructure as a Service web server provides service authoring and infrastructure administration to the vRA product interface. The web server components communicate with the management service. The management service is what provides updates from the SQL Server database, the Distribution Execution Manager (DEM), and agents.
- Model Manager
Using models, vRA facilitates integration with databases and external systems. The Model Manager provides utilities and services for versioning, persisting, distributing, and securing model elements. An infrastructure as a service web server hosts Model Manager. It communicates with DEMs, the product interface website, and the SQL Server database.
- Distributed Execution Manager
The DEM component is responsible for running the business logic of customized models. It also interacts with the external databases, the IaaS SQL Server database, and systems. All DEM instances act as workers or orchestrators. The DEM orchestrator is responsible for a lot of functions, such as scheduling workflows, monitoring DEM workers, processing workflows, and other functions.
2. SQL Server
To maintain information about the machines it manages and its elements and policies, IaaS uses the Microsoft SQL Server database. This means you can use the recommended MSSQL server to configure the vRA database.
3. Deployment Options
vRA comes with two deployment options: minimal and enterprise. You get to choose the one you want when installing vRA. Note: This is assuming the customer chooses the on-prem version of vRA. There is a cloud version as well that is still evolving and does not have all feature parity with the on-premises version.
- Minimal Deployment
This includes one VMware vRealize Automation appliance and one Windows Server to host the IaaS components. In this type of deployment, you can host the vRA SQL Server database on the same IaaS Windows server with the IaaS components. Alternatively, you can host it on a separate Windows server.
- Enterprise Deployment
Depending on your requirements, a distributed enterprise deployment comes in various sizes. It needs redundant servers, redundant appliances, and load balancing, especially when you need more capacity. Large-scale distributed deployments usually provide better scale, availability, and disaster recovery.