Big news for customers who are already using or planning to use our vRealize products! We launched a wide set of new versions of our vRealize products on the 23rd of August. If you haven’t seen what’s new, please visit the VMware.com/products website or have a log on our VMware blog. In my previous post I announced and wrote about all the news and updates on VMware Code Stream 2.1 – in this article, I would like to share more of the improvements, fixes, updates and other cool stuff that our product team has worked on in Realize Code Stream Management Pack for IT DevOps 2.1.1.
vRealize Code Stream Management Pack for IT DevOps – what is it and for what can you use it for? (aka Project Houdini if you are familiar with the code name)
The VMware vRealize Code Stream Management Pack for IT DevOps is an extensible, customizable framework that provides a set of release management processes for software-defined content with the ability to capture, version control, test, release and rollback. This management pack makes it possible to dispense with the time-consuming and error-prone manual processes currently required to manage software-defined content. Supported content includes entities from vRealize Automation, Orchestration, Operations and vSphere.
Licensing – how can you use it together with vRealize Code Stream?
The vRealize Code Stream Management Pack for IT DevOps is available at no charge to customers of vRealize Code Stream and vRealize Automation Advanced or Enterprise editions. For further information about these products or to obtain evaluation licenses, contact your VMware account representative.
What’s new in version 2.1.1?
The v2.1.1 release provides enhanced functionality in these areas:
- Support for running the management pack on vRA 7.1/vRCS 2.1 appliance
- Support for both a fresh install and in place upgrade.
- Support for managing content from vRealize Automation 7.1 endpoints.
- Support for managing content from vROps 6.3 endpoints.
- vRA 7 Package Type enhancements: o Added support for vRA 7 Event Broker (Subscriptions) package type (AutomationSubscription).
- Support for managing vRA 7 custom Resource Mappings and Resources Types including all Orchestrator dependencies when being used as part of a Resource Action or XaaS Blueprint.
- Property Groups support added for All Tenants as well as local Tenants Other enhancements. o Various bug fixes detailed below
What issues did we resolve with the new version 2.1.1?
Don’t worry about the list of issues that I posted here – in most circumstances you probably never see those listed problems appear in your installation of the management pack. In case you run into on or multiple of those issues, you might be excited to hear that we resolved the following known issues:
- System stops processing requests due to vRO task scheduler authentication error (ID: 1671886)
- Conditional Expressions on Tasks in the Codestream Pipelines updated to support vRCS 2.1 (ID: 1705542)
- Property Definitions linked to Property Groups defined at Blueprint level are not captured/released as dependencies (ID: 1689715 )
- vRA7 Blueprint with Software Component Fails with Dependency Error on fresh deployment (ID: 1689674)
- Downloading nested workflow dependencies fails (ID: 1689379)
- vRA Property Groups not captured when visibility is All Tenants (ID: 1686517)
- vSphere Content Packages – Encoded characters in the names (or parent folders) fails to return a list of objects. (ID: 1686512)
- vSphere clusters are not listed when they are within a folder (ID: 1686504)
- Incorrect error shown in pipeline when release fails under certain conditions. (ID: 1684662)
- vRA Resource Action deployment fails due to missing custom resource (ID: 1684660)
- Resource Mappings and their vRO dependencies (action or workflow) is not exported by XaaS package type (ID: 1684652)
- RP Test Content Remote fails for vROps content with HTTP 400 (ID: 1684300)
- Add Content Endpoint workflow doesn’t remove Config Element on failure (ID: 1682880)
- Unable to add Remote Content Server – tar: storage/artifactory/clm/install/cts.tar No such file or directory (ID: 1679858)
- Fields are not mapped properly in testResult field on Add Content Endpoint XaaS blueprint (ID: 1676377)
- RP Deploy Content Doesn’t Resume or Retry (ID: 1673961)
- 25 Blueprint limit when listing vRA Blueprints on Captures (ID: 1666426)
What are the current limitations of the new version 2.1.1?
This management pack release has the following functional limitations:
- IAAS-Blueprint package type (vRA 6.2) – Only vSphere blueprints are supported. This is for the create and clone workflows but excludes linked clones because linked clone snapshots are not on a remote vRealize Automation instance.
- IAAS-Blueprint package type (vRA 6.2) – Property dictionary custom properties are not supported.
- IAAS-Blueprint package type (vRA 6.2) – Multi-machine blueprints are not supported.
- IAAS-Blueprint package type (vRA 6.2) – Any vSphere blueprint that is used as a component blueprint is not supported.
- For vSphere blueprints based on virtual machine cloning in vRA 7 or 6.2 endpoints, datacollection needs to have run first on the content endpoint before releasing the blueprint otherwise the operation may fail.
- Files-Linux Type – Only entire folders are captured. Individual files cannot be selected.
- ASD-Action (vRA 6.2) and Automation-ResourceAction (vRA 7) types – Entitlements must be created on the content endpoint manually and the actions must be assigned after release.
- ASD-Blueprint (vRA 6.2) and Automation-XaaSBlueprint (vRA 7) types – If the catalog Service the blueprint was originally assigned to on capture is not present on the release endpoint, it will be created, but manual assignment is required to an entitlement to make the released item available in the catalog.
- Users with Approval rights are set globally and not by package type which results in limited role-based access control.
- If you have access to management pack items, you can capture, test, and release any package type to any endpoint that does not require approval.
- If you have deployed packages, they are available to everyone in the Content business group.
- vSphere-Template type – unit test workflows can only be run on the system (Default) vRealize Orchestrator instance.
- vSphere-CustomSpec type – Windows requires a manual step to update passwords after deployment to a target environment.
- vRA 6.x package types (IAAS-Blueprint, IAAS-BuildProfile, ASD-Action and ASD-Blueprint) require manually installing Java 1.7 on the CTS host – see the Installation Guide for more details.
- vRealize Operations package types require SSH to be enabled on the target server.
- vRealize Operations package types are supported on the Appliance versions 6.1.x, 6.2.x, and 6.3.x. VMware vRealize Code Stream Management Pack for IT DevOps Release Notes 6 VMware, Inc.
- On creating a vRA endpoint IaaS credentials are not tested when testing the connection on the XaaS form, and the IaaS certificate fingerprint is not presented for verification.
- CloudClient 4.1 is unable to authenticate on the Management Pack vRA deployment due to the lack of an IaaS server. This is will be resolved in CloudClient 4.2. Workaround is to use CloudClient 4.0.
- Property groups that are captured with “All Tenants” will release to each tenant as “This Tenant”. This is an API limitation in vRA.
- All vRA 7 Custom Resources or Resource Mapping across vRA instances must be named the same (if they were manually created otherwise they will be imported correctly).
Would you like to get started? Here some really good resources for you:):
vRealize Code Stream Management Pack for IT DevOps
