VCAP-CMA Deploy – Objective 7.1
Disclaimer: These are my notes from studying for the 3V0-31.18 exam. If something doesn’t make sense, please feel free to reach out.
The main goal for this objective is scaling vRealize Automation
Objective 7.1 – Scale vRealize Automation components to a highly-available configuration
References
There are a few ways to scaling a vRA installation. The simplest of which involves installing IaaS components on your Windows servers & using the VAMI to add another vRA node to the cluster.
The automatable alternatives are vra-command and the API. They’re detailed really well in a blog post series (part 2 & part 3) from the Cloud Management BU over at VMware.
For this post (based on my assumptions about the exam) we’ll be using the manual method. Let’s say we’ve got any environment setup like the below:
Later down the line, we want to make this setup resilient, looking like the below:
Firstly we’ll need to deploy another vRA appliance and another two Windows servers.
vRA Appliance
Browse to the active appliance’s VAMI and open the cluster page to confirm the component parts of your existing cluster.
You can see the current status of the node is not in cluster mode and the three boxes that are part of the environment currently.
On the new vRA appliance’s VAMI page, log in and cancel the setup wizard. Browse to the cluster page, confirm the node is not part of a cluster. Fill in the details of the active node and hit the Join Cluster button. You’ll be asked to verify the certificate if you’re using self-signed certs.
Once complete, you can check that both nodes are visible on the cluster tab, messaging tab and on the database tab.
IaaS Nodes
Little bit more complicated for the IaaS nodes as you’ll need to satisfy the pre-requisites manually. I’m only covering this for one of the two boxes I’m adding, but the process is the same for each. Log into the IaaS box and download the IaaS installer from one of the vRA appliances. Run this, connect to a vRA box, select the IaaS role and run the pre-requisite checker. This will very quickly highlight if you’ve missed any of the pre-requisites! Assuming this passes, continue through the install. Once it’s finished, add the server to your load balanced server pool and all done!