OVAs Are Now A Content Source in vRealize Automation (Welcome Bitnami)

There is a great new feature in vRealize Automation Cloud that highlights an acquisition that VMware made last year. Bitnami became part of the VMware family late in 2019 to bring an entire library of prepackaged application stacks to the VMware Marketplace. Bitnami makes it easy to get your favorite open source software up and running on any platform, including your laptop, Kubernetes and all the major clouds. One of the formats that is provided for these popular application stacks is the Open Virtual Appliance (OVA) format. The latest feature to be introduced in Service Broker is the ability to deploy any of the Bitnami OVAs available from the Bitnami community catalog. In this blog we will walk through setting up OVAs as a content source for Service Broker and adding it to the self-service catalog capabilities of Service Broker in vRealize Automation Cloud.

The Market Place in Cloud Assembly:

From within Cloud Assembly in vRealize Automation Cloud there is a tab you can select called Marketplace:

In the Marketplace you can import pre-created blueprints for Cloud Assembly as well as select from images (OVAs) that are available. Many of these images are brought to us from the Bitnami Community Catalog.

Service Broker Catalog:

What if you want to provide these OVAs directly to you users in a self-service catalog? Service Broker gives you that capability. Service Broker allows you to present all kinds of items in a self-service catalog and allow users only the items they need to see based on the governance you put in place. With the introduction of OVAs as a content source in Service Broker you can now add the application stacks available from Bitnami as direct deployments from the Service Broker catalog.

Let’s set it up:

Creating OVAs as a Content Source:

From within Service Broker select Content & Policies, then Content Sources, and the select New.

From the list of possible content sources select Marketplace VM Template – OVA.

Now you can configure the new content source by giving it a name, in this example we called it Marketplace OVAs. Then select the Source Integration Account. This is the account you used to setup the MyVMware in Cloud Assembly. Finally, select the validate button, and once successful, select Create & Import.

Now select Content Sharing from the left menu, select the project(s) you would like to add the content to, then select ADD ITEMS.

A new window will appear where you can select the new content to be added to the project. First select the dropdown box that says Content Sources and select All Content. This lists all the individual content from all content sources. Let’s find our WordPress OVA by using the filter and enter WordPress. You will see that it filters all the content to anything with WordPress in the title. Let’s select the basic WordPress appliance for this example. Once selected click on the SAVE button.

You will now see the WordPress OVA as a content item for your project in Service Broker.

Finally you can now customize the catalog item from the CONTENT menu on the right side of the Service Broker navigation pane. You have the option to add a custom icon or create a custom form using the Custom Form Editor.

Now you can click on the Catalog view in Service Broker and see the new catalog item for deploying the WordPress OVA, supplied by Bitnami, as a self-service item.

Summary:

With the introduction of OVAs as a content source in the Service Broker service of vRealize Automation, you can utilize the many OVAs available in the VMware Marketplace. Hopefully you found this quick introduction into this great new capability useful. Check out some of the other blogs brought to you by the great teams within VMware Cloud Management.