September 2020 – Hyperconverged Infrastructure & Virtualization

Next, We Create a New Environment and then create an New VRA environment using vRLCM

Go to Home and Click on Create Environment to get started

The Default password is used for all the products being deployed using this instance

In this case, we selected the vRA deployment with deployment type as Small for the lab

Agree to the EULA, click Next

Enter the License

Select the NTP Servers and then click Next

Input all the Network Details and click Next

Select the Certificate which we have generated before and click Next

This is where things have gotten tricky in this version as we have multiple options to define the VRA environment including the windows template to create new vms themseleves.

let us go step by step process

Under Product Properties, provide the windows server username and password which you want to access after the box has been provisioned using the windows template.

In the above configuration, We have only 3 VMs being deployed in VRA Simple Configuration.

VRA Primary Appliance
VRA DB server (Database server)
VRA IAAS web server (this contains iaas-web server, iaas manager, iaas DEM Worker and proxy-agent-vsphere )

Once all the Product details of VRA are put in, we will proceed to the precheck phase.

Click on RUN PRECHECK option to continue

Next, we click on Validate & Deploy option to deploy the vms

Make sure you disable UAC in the windows template and then click on Validate & Deploy option to continue.

Looks like my test failed with 2 Items, which I will be rectifying before trying to Validate again before Deployment

NOTE: The re-validation took more than 30 mins in my lab to complete. Not sure why it took a lot of time, but I suggest you all to be patient during this process as there is no way to speed it up.

The validation is successful and now we can go ahead and run the PRECHECK to continue

NOTE that at this point, I haven’t installed SQL Software on the SQL Server, but VRSLM has created an windows server for both the db and iaas install. I will have to install SQL Server on the db windows VM and see how it goes.

This Post is pending and I will be updating it soon once I have some clarification on if I need to install and configure the SQL software in the vRA SQL server windows machine or will the scripts do it if I provide the SQL ISO file. Stay Tuned …….

This Blog Post is to Install & Configure vRealize Life Cycle Manager 2.1 in my lab environment.

The reason why I had to install vRLCM 2.1 is to install and configure vRA 7.4/7.5 in my environment.

Deploy the vRLCM OVF file in the lab and the below screenshots will show the configuration after deploying the appliance.

After you login into the vRLCM appliance, the self help starts and below are the screenshots.

Main Page after login using the local user. Click on Start to get started.

Click on Next to configure product binaries

Click on Got it to complete the Self Help.

Now, Let us change the root password of the appliance from the settings option -> System Administration and click on SAVE to move ahead with the configuration.

Change the root account password and click save to save the appliance credential

Next, we configure NTP Servers and DNS Servers from Servers and Protocol option

Next, we configure the Product Binaries (Where we download the vRA 7.x version using the my vmware account or using the Product Binaries option)

Provide my vmware credentials and then select the product to download

In my case, I have downloaded vRealize Automation 7.6 version to install and configure in my lab.

We will continue with the vRA 7.6 configuration below.

First, Let us configure the Certificates in vRLCM so that the certificate can be used to Deploy the components through vRLCM.

Click on Certificate Management on the left hand side, I will be Generating an CSR as I would like to use my AD CA Signing Authority to generate an Certificate for this instance.

Some of the fields have been blurred for privacy .. Click Generate

Once the CSR is generated, use it to create an Cert and then download the Cert chain which will be in the .p7b format. Use this cert chain to create an pem file.

In my case, I used Cygwin in windows to create an pem file, but with an .cer extension. I had to open the csr file generated which contained the key certificate and then open the generated .cer file by using Cygwin to input the Domain Certificate (in this case, its the vrlcm certificate from the CA, Intermediate CA and Root CA into the Import field and imported it.

NOTE: These are the links which helped me to use Cygwin on my Windows machine to generate the PEM file from existing cert.p7b file
https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=3wywzRvfLHo
https://support.delphix.com/Delphix_Virtualization_Engine/Sysadmin/Extracting_PEM_Certificates_from_a_.p7b_Bundle_File_(KBA1859)
Use the Command ” openssl pkcs7 -inform PEM -outform PEM -in certnew.p7b -print_certs > certificate.cer ” after copying the certnew.p7b file into the C:\cygwin64\home\username directory to generate a new .cer file

Next, We create a Data Center

Next, We Add vCenter Server to this Data Center we created

In this case, I had to select the option ‘Consolidated Management and Workload’ as this is a lab environment. In a production environment, you would typically select either an Management or Workload Domain.

Since, This Post was getting too big, I have decided to split it into 2 parts. The Installation of vRA and its configuration is explained in the next part.

The link to Next Part — https://wordpress.com/block-editor/post/hypervc.com/943