What this book covers
Chapter 1, vRealize Automation and the Deconstruction of Components, intends to refresh your understanding with a succinct introduction to the vRealize automation architecture, and it depicts the high level details of every component involved.
Chapter 2, Distributed Installation Using Custom Certificates, implements and configures distributed architecture with custom certificates, which is a formidable task. While many blogs and official documentation talk about default installation, this chapter has the step-by-step illustrative recipe that will make it easy to follow and help you install and configure vRealize automation quickly and with a much better understanding.
Chapter 3, Functional Validation – Phase 1 and Installing Secondary Nodes, continues to install the remaining components in the distributed architecture; it will be worthwhile only if the installed components function out of the box. Once the setup is corroborated to be functional, we will advance and complete the installation.
Chapter 4, Configuring a Guest OS for vRealize Automation vSphere Blueprints, explains that the vRA blueprint can be created for different endpoints; this chapter will focus on the blueprint for the vSphere endpoint. Before we configure a blueprint for the vSphere endpoint, the vCenter-based templates need to go through a few configuration procedures. This is important for a successful deployment of the catalog items.
Chapter 5, Functional Validation – Phase 2 and Zero to VM Provisioning, spends time checking whether the setup is working as expected. While we deploy a service catalog item from the self-service user portal, we will discover the several stages of catalog deployment.
Chapter 6, Testing Failover Scenarios for vRealize Automation Components, explains that the job is not yet done once the installation and functional verification are successful. We'll spend time checking the failover scenarios for various components in this chapter.
Chapter 7, vRealize Orchestrator in High Availability via the NSX Load Balancer, focuses on the central topic of discussion in this chapter, which is the high availability configuration via NSX load balancer for vRealize Orchestrator. The Orchestrator cluster provides not only high availability, but also load balancing when configured with NSX or other third-party load balancer. We will delve into this in depth.
Chapter 8, The Power of Advanced Service Designer (ASD), provides the ability for service architects to create advanced services and publish them as catalog items. This provides the ability to create XaaS or Anything as a Service using VMware vRealize Orchestrator.
