eBooks

First Impressions of vRealize Automa on 8 (vRA8) Many of us have been eager to get our hands on vRealize Automa on 8 (vRA8) for some me now. Maybe you've dabbled in the Hands On Labs with vRealize Automa on Cloud (vRAC) for the past year. You've likely been through quite a few versions, upgrades, migra ons, and code changes in your me working with the vRealize products. This ar cle covers some of our first impressions of vRA8 and we're providing this as you weigh your op ons with the end-of-support for vRA7 in 2022. Introduc on There is a lot to cover here. The product has been re-wri en from the ground up. The Cafe and IaaS nodes are no longer. Any vRO7 custom workflows will most likely have to be re-wri en. Migra ons will have to be planned and extensive tes ng required prior to any produc on deployment. However, you are probably ac vely engaged in working with vRA in some fashion, and you're excited to see the new capabili es offered in vRA 8.x. The following is a two-part summary of some of the very high-level aspects of the new system that have jumped out a er working with VMware's reconstructed code for the vRA pla orm. In part one, we look at working with the documenta on of vRA8 and tagging, the new way to manage your machine metadata. Part 2 will cover ABX and Policies. Documenta on and Community Backing Learning a new pla orm and a new applica on architecture always come with challenges, and o en those challenges relate to how well the product is documented. To get off the ground with vRA8, following the process of preparing infrastructure for resource deployment is easy. That por on of the setup is completed in about 30 minutes, and for the most part, it's clear to understand what's going on with the new components (Cloud Zones, Flavor Mappings, Image Mappings, etc.). Where you may hit some difficul es is in going through building the first blueprint and making it work with other constructs in the environment. YAML may be a new concept for some, and, while we found that the editor was intui ve, when we wanted to do something outside of a basic VM deployment, the documenta on was lacking advanced use case examples. The documenta on is available right from the portal, which makes having to reference something much easier than in past versions. You can select the link to take you right to the VMware docs page. Just be careful, because that link will display search results for all VMware products, although these results can be further filtered to include just vRA8. 2 M I G R AT I O N G U I D E

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