Nikolay Nikolov

I have been with VMware since August 2016, but I've got more than 8 years of experience with building and managing complex private and public clouds based on VMware and Microsoft technologies. My current endeavour is related to making customers successful in their deployment and use of VMware vRealize Automation. While not at work I like reading books, study languages and do sports.

Recent Posts

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Resetting vRA Access Policies via API

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Many of us dealing with vRA have at least once been stuck in the situation where they are not able to log in due to bad configuration of the access policies or an identity provider not working. The frustration is enormous, because you start thinking about different ways to overcome the nasty error and finally Read more...

vRA and ServiceNow – beyond the boring stuff

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Many companies are using our vRealize Automation plug-in for ITSM which delivers blueprints to standard ServiceNow catalogs. For the majority of use cases it is working well and many find it useful. And boring as hell. The reason for this is that the plug-in is not giving you everything the vRA portal does. However, just because we Read more...

Managed Service Accounts (GMSA) and vRA

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Part of my job as a Customer Success Architect is to consult customers on various topics around vRA. Sometimes, those topics go to uncharted territory. One of them is managing the IaaS service account and its password according to security protocols. VMware supports this and we even have a procedure defined in a KB, but Read more...

Scaling a vRA 7.3 Environment (Part 3)

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Last time we explored the wonderful vra-command tool. Now it’s time to dive into the REST API world of vRA configuration. You may already know the vRA API and probably may have already used it. However, if you open a browser and navigate to https://you-vra-va:5480/config you’ll see a nice UI listing all the available options for meddling with your infrastructure: Read more...

Scaling a vRA 7.3 Environment (Part 2)

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Last time we installed a distributed vRA 7.3 environment by using only one node per role. Here comes the time when you have to add another node for each role, to the vRA setup, because vRA has become a critical asset and you want to lower the downtime of the service. There are a few Read more...

Scaling a vRA 7.3 Environment (Part 1)

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Let’s say you’re the kind of person that doesn’t like wasting resources – you use public transportation, electric if possible (here in Eastern Europe we love EVs), you separate your trash, buy new mountaineering equipment only when necessary, always turn off the lights in the bathroom and you really like the scaling features of virtual infrastructures. Read more...
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Troubleshooting vRealize Automation and MS DTC

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An often-overlooked component of the vRA IaaS infrastructure is the Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator (MS DTC). This blog deals with common problems and troubleshooting techniques specifically targeting vRA. In my line of work, I often see that different organizations have different security and configuration standards. vRA has some strict DTC requirements, which ensure that all Read more...

How to use dynamic property definitions in vRA 7.2

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Since vRA 7.2. was released we are seeing more and more customers with earlier vRA versions wanting to move to the new version. I was recently involved in a migration of a customer’s production environment from vRA 6.2 to 7.2 (If you haven’t heard of migration, check it out – it’s a totally awesome feature). Read more...