vRealize Automation Explained

    Admins Guide to keeping vRA healthy   I've compiled this guide based on my experience troubleshooting countless vRA environments. Whether you are responsible for administering a vRA environment or just looking to get more comfortable with the product in general you are in the right place. This post will be aimed more towards proactive steps which can be taken to prevent future issues from occurring. However, if you find yourself already in a hole you may want to check out the various troubleshooting post from my 7.x series: vRA appliances services not registering IaaS service not registering Troubleshooting vRA Provisioning failures The topics & issues discussed below are primarily geared towards vRA 7.x however the majority of the principals can still be applied to vRA 8.x Check List Certificates Disk Space Understanding Provisioning Process ( most crucial in my opinion ) Load balancer config Backup plan Certificates One of the most common easily avoidable issue...

  vRA 8.x Infoblox Plugin throws a certificate error during validation When initially setting up infoblox integration or after replacing infoblox certificate for existing integration in vRA 8.x you may see the following error: Unable to validate the provided access credentials: Failed to validate credentials. AdapterReference: http://provisioningservice.prelude.svc.cluster.local:8282/provisioning/adapter/ipam/endpointconfig. Error: Execution of action Infoblox_ValidateEndpoint failed on provider side: Infoblox HTTP request failed with: HTTPSConnectionPool(host=’pb0infblx01.flexlab.local’, port=443): Max retries exceeded with url: /wapi/v2.7/networkview?_return_fields=name (Caused by SSLError(SSLError(“bad handshake: Error([(‘SSL routines’, ‘tls_process_server_certificate’, ‘certificate verify failed’)],)”,),)) Cloud account: null Task: /provisioning/endpoint-tasks/820902de-bf34-4c91-8217- e3eedd8ea609 (less) Cause The cause is that vRA will not simply allow you to just ...

 How to remove Machines from vRA 7.x The steps here are contained in VMware Kb article 2144269 but read on below for a more user-friendly guide & explanation of the process. From time to time it is required to remove a machine from vRA management manually. The destroy operation may only partially succeed in vRA due to a temporary issue with vSphere proxy agent or the vm might be restored from backup in vCenter with a different UID resulting in it being marked as " Missing " in vRA UI. The VMware KB article focuses on removing machine using the cloud client however I have found that to be the least successful method. The most successful & reliable way for me has been direct database manipulation contained in KB2144269_RemoveVMFromVRA7.zip file attached to the above KB. Quick points before we begin The steps covered here only remove the machines from vRA management , they do not delete the vm's from vCenter,  so if the vm's haven't already been removed from...

  Reset or Unlock vRA 7.x Appliance root user "Unable to authenticate user (invalid credentials or Account locked). Please try again" See procedure below for resetting password or unlocking vRA 7.x appliance root user account. Because every now and then it happens.... Procedure * Note the steps below require downtime, as always best practise dictates you first snapshot before any config changes * Below are the steps to reset vRA appliance root password. 1. Connect to vSphere Client and open the vRA/vRB virtual machine console. 2. Go to VM > Power > Restart Guest to restart the appliance. 3. Wait for the appliance to boot. - You need to be QUICK in step 4 if you miss it boot again !     4. Press e when you see the Grub Menu appearing on the screen. 5. Press e again. The output will be similar to: 6. Go down until you see a line beginning with linux /vmlinuz. (highlighted above) 7. Press " e " one last time to edit the end of this line, add the command: init=/...