Connecting vRealize Orchestrator 7.6 to vCenter

Do note, this is not a "best practice" guide, more a documentation on how I did configuration in my home lab

Most likely the first thing that you want to do with your Orchestrator, is to add your vCenter instance to your Orchestrator, so you can run workflows against it.

To do that, let's log in to your Orchestrator HTML5 Client.

Go to workflows. We need to search the right workflow for us. Use two keywords, "add" and "vcenter", and we should be able to find a correct workflow

Click "RUN" on "Add a vCenter Server instance" workflow to start it.

Give your vCenter IP or FQDN to form. You might also want to check "Do you want to ignore certificate warnings? If you select Yes, the vCenter Server instance certificate is accepted silently and the certificate is added to the trusted store", at least if you are using self-signed certificates.

Go to "Set the connection properties" tab, and give username and password that are used to connect to vCenter. 

Click "Run", and wait for workflow to run.

If everything goes as expected, you should see that status is "completed".

You can now go to Administration -> Inventory, and you should be able to see your vCenter inventory from here:

We have now succesfully added our vCenter instance to Orchestrator!

Installing vRealize Orchestrator 7.6

VMware vRealize Orchestrator has changed quite a lot, and it now has a brand new HTML5 client, which is the default one. You can still use legacy client, but there can be some compatibility issues between workflows done with new vs. legacy client.

Do note, this is not a "best practice" guide, more a documentation on how I did installation in my home lab

Orchestrator comes as an ova file, so deploying it is quite straight forward, and I'm not going to through that process.

But, after you have done the initial deployment, this is what I did.

I first logged in to https://<appliance ip>:5480, to check if there are any updates available. Well, there was none at that time.

Next I went to Control Center. You can find it by going to front page of your appliance, https://<appliance ip>:8281/vco/ (or by going to http://<appliance ip>, which will redirect you there) and selecting "Start the Control Center"

It will ask you for you root / pass, that you provided during deployment of .ova

First we configure a host name:

Then authentication. Since I do not have vRealize Automation, I did choose vSphere as authentication mode, and gave it my vCenter address:

You need to click "accept certificate" first.

Give account that you use to connect to vCenter:

 After that, you need to select Admin group that has access to vRO, and you are done.

Now you should see vRO Control Center

If you want, you can test that authentication works, by going "Configure Authentication Provider -> Test Login"

Now you should be able to login to your Orchestrator Client, go to front page of your appliance, and select "Start the orchestrator client"

For the first time, it gave me this:

But after logging out of my vCenter, I was able to log in succesfully. It should give you your vCenter login page:

And after giving credentials,we are logged in to our brand new HTML5 based orchestrator client!

My HomeLab setup

On end of last year, I started to slowly build up up a home lab to be able to test all kinds of things, and to study more some of our own applications.

And don't get me wrong here, we have a great demo environments, but they are something that you are not supposed to break down. And sometimes, to really understand that how things work, you actually need to break them.

So I decided that I finally need to build up my own home lab environment.

And here is my current physical setup:

VMware (all in version 6.7):

•  Virtual vCenter Appliance
• "Production" Cluster:
• 1x Intel NUC8i5BEK, i5-8259U @ 2.3 GHz, 64GB RAM
• 1x Intel NUC7i3BNK, i3-7100U @ 2.4 GHz, 32GB RAM
• 1x Omen by HP laptop, i7-8750H @ 2.20GHz, 16GB RAM. This one I occasionally boot up from USB-disk containing ESX installation, if I need temporarily more compute power, or to test some DR scenarios etc.

Hyper-V, standalone host, Win 2016 Core

• ASUS UX303L laptop, Intel® Core™ i7 4510U @ 2GHz, 8GB. This is my old laptop with broken display. Only sad thing with this is that it wont boot if it's not attached to some display while booting, have not figured out how to bypass that. This one uses local SSD in laptop, so no connection to shared storage.

Network:

• HP OfficeConnect Switch 1820-24G. This is reasonably priced (web)managed switch, and at least in my home lab 1 Gbps connections are fast enough. Still for my Storage I did a 2 Gbps trunk.

Storage:

• QNAP TS879 Pro, equipped with 8x 3TB disks. And configured to RAID-10. So more than enough of capacity and performance for my needs. This is my main storage for the VMware environment. Disks are both iSCSI and NFS (Why both? Well, because I can). Connected to my switch with 2x links, so I have 2 Gbps connection for storage.
• Buffalo LinkStation LS220D. This is my secondary storage for homelab and primary storage for my personal files. And I use it as a secondary backup target for my homelab, and use my QNAP as a primary backup target for files in this one.

Firewall: 

• pfSense, running in virtual machine. Only one node, but since I now have to hosts, I'm going to make this one HA

So, what do I do with this environment then, and what do I have running in there?

Well, besides the basic infra services that you just have to have (DNS, AD etc) I have installed for example:

• VMware Orchestrator 7.6 (<- I hopefully have some time to blog about this later)
• A lot of Veeam stuff, including:
• Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5U4b and V10 beta1 (<- Yes, it's out!)
• Veeam Availability Orchestrator v2 (<- I'm planning to blog about this also)
• Veeam One v9.5
• Veeam Backup for Office 365 v3

I have also been playing around with Minio lately. (Hint, it has a lot to do with Backup & Replication)

Best here is, that I can pretty much test anything I want to, and if (read: when) I mess up with something, it only affects me, not anyone else.

And, hopefully this will help me to write a lot more blog posts.

Your blog will reboot in 3..2..1..NOW!

Wow, my blog has been silent for a bit over three years now. 

I just lost my motivation (and time) to write anything.

But I'm trying to start it all over again, let's see what happens. I already have some ideas on what to write about. 

So, now with a new name, and also with a new Instagram account (since I lost my access to old one, sigh....)

Feel free to start following, I will do my best to make this blog active again.