By David Coulter, SovLabs
As your company’s business services expands into the application enabled mobile world, the total number of machines, applications and configurations quickly outpace the ability to effectively manage them. Speed of delivery becomes a major problem as your hybrid cloud starts to take hold. Your DevOps and IT teams need automated lifecycle management for your applications and infrastructure in order to excel at service delivery in today’s hybrid environment.
If you have or are considering building a hybrid cloud with vRealize Automation, there are many new productized integrations now available that are designed to quickly integrate and enable many crucial IT and platform capabilities directly within vRealize Automation. All solutions aspire to be easy but SovLabs took a differenciated approach to be intuitively and flexibly vRA driven rather than relying on business logic to be developed in vRealize Orchestrator (vRO). There’s also a common framework across all the modules and they’re designed for interoperability with one another with a similar style and common modular approach. Stay tuned for a follow on blog for details on the SovLabs Module Framework.
Integrations such as:
| Category | vRealize Automation Extensibility Module |
| Configuration Management | Puppet Enterprise |
| Configuration Management | Puppet Open Source with Foreman |
| Configuration Management | Red Hat Satellite |
| DNS | Microsoft DNS |
| DNS | Infoblox DNS |
| IP Management | Infoblox IPAM |
| IP Management | Microsoft IPAM |
| IP Management | SolarWinds IPAM |
| Directory Services | Microsoft Active Directory Registration |
| Cloud Management | Custom Naming |
| Cloud Management | Notifications |
| App Container Management | Multi-Cloud Docker Container Management with Nirmata |
In addition to expanding offerings in the above categories, we are continuously developing new modules to address common integration needs like service management, network load balancing, firewall / security, backup / recovery, and public cloud. Don’t see what you’re looking for? Let us know!
Key Benefits of the SovLabs Lifecycle Integrations for vRealize Automation:
- Designed to be simple yet comprehensive: install, run, upgrade, multiple vRA/vRO/target version supported in one plug-in
- Use case driven: prescriptive yet flexible; SovLabs template engine allows you the ability to customize without custom development
- vRA driven: save time by avoiding workflow orchestration development; the configuration / operation for our modules is done in vRA
- Common Framework across all integrations: one plugin to rule them all; licensing unlocks additional modules
- Fully supported: end-to-end solutions are bult to handle the “last mile” development challenge
The following is a detailed summary of the Puppet Enterprise Module as an example to show the extensive integration use cases and support matrix you will get with SovLabs productized integrations. The demonstration video can be found here.
Overview of the SovLabs Puppet Enterprise Module
The SovLabs Puppet Enterprise Module increases IT agility and speed of delivery for systems and applications by combining SovLabs Module Framework with Puppet’s advanced configuration management and vRealize Automation’s provisioning and lifecycle management capabilities. Easily create dynamic, software-defined Puppet configurations directly in vRA and tie them to existing IaaS catalog items to enable automatic Puppet driven application deployments and system configurations. The integration involves a vRealize Orchestrator Plug-in which hosts the module framework and integration logic along with XaaS services pre-built for creating and managing dynamic configuration templates as well as workflow hooks for use during provisioning/de-provisioning cycles. Designed for ease of ownership, the entire solution can be deployed or upgraded via a simple 2-step process, regardless of vRA version.
Highlights of the Integration
- Supports node classification support for Hiera, Manifest files and Puppet Enterprise Console
- Creates node in the Puppet Enterprise Console and assigns node to class(es) and group(s)
- Supports multiple versions of Puppet Enterprise: 3.8.1, 2015.x, 2016.x
- Installs Puppet Agent, configures puppet.conf, creates Hiera data and local Facter facts, if desired
- Supports Hiera-Eyaml for automatic encryption of sensitive data such as passwords and certificates
- Supports certificate signing/cleaning or Puppet autosign scenarios
- Eases portability between private and public cloud scenarios: agentless, OS native protocols
- Supports code manager, r10k and custom deployment/code promotion scenarios and pre/post activities via inline command definitions
- Ties in existing custom vRO workflow content via workflow hooks
- Supports simple or distributed Puppet implementations
- Supports creation of multiple Puppet Master and Puppet Agent configurations as needed
- Delivers dozens to thousands of Puppet deployment scenarios with minimal overhead via dynamic template configurations and vRA property injection, avoiding Blueprint sprawl
- Simple 2-step install and upgrade process
- Quick start process: Define Puppet Master and Agent configs, apply to existing blueprint and provision!
One of the first questions we get asked is how applicable is this solution across all the versions of the key software tools. The support is quite extensive:
- Puppet Enterprise: 3.8.1, 2015.x, 2016.x
- VMware vRealize Automation 6.x, 7.x
- VMware vRealize Orchestrator 5.5.x, 6.x, 7.x
- EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud (EHC) version 3.0, 3.1, and 3.5 supported
The full array of SovLabs solutions can be found here.
