Automation

vRealize Automation 8.5

VMware recently announced general availability of vRealize Automation 8.5. I will dive in what’s new in vRA 8.5, what they fixed and what’s still pending there.

Generally speaking, vRealize Automation 8.5 adds capabilities focusing on the areas of multi-cloud support with Azure, extensibility with vRealize Orchestrator and ABX as well as expansion of network automation capabilities with vSphere and NSX.

What’s new in vRealize Automation 8.5

  • Project Administrator can act as Approver for all approval requests – When creating an approval policy, administrators can select a Project Administrator (for the project in which the approval was triggered) as the approver.
  • Configure when IP address from IPAM is released – You can configure how long it takes for an IP address to be released from allocation once it is no longer used. This allows for faster provisioning of new workloads where IP addresses are scarce.
  • Limit the number of namespaces for a project on a Kubernetes zone – The maximum number of supervisor namespaces that can be deployed for the project on a given K8s zone now has a configurable limit.
  • VMware vRealize Orchestrator plug-in for vRealize Automation 8.5 – The updated vRealize Automation plug-in supports scripting objects generation such as cloud accounts, cloud zones, projects, tags, and CRUD operations to build your own content.
  • Enable resources across Azure regions to be added to the same resource group – An Azure resource group is created in an Azure region. However, resources from any Azure region can be added into it. This feature enables admins to add resources from other regions into the Azure RG.
  • Snapshot management for Azure disks – You can now pass the resource group name, encryption set, and network policy while creating the disk snapshot.
  • Ability to enable/disable boot diagnostics for Azure VMs – Day 2 – You can enable/disable boot diagnostics for Azure VMs as a day 2 action.
  • Support for NSX-V to NSX-T migration with vSphere 6.7 – vRealize Automation NSX-V to NSX-T migration now supports migrating deployments that are running on vSphere 6.7.
  • Support for existing global security group as part of NSX-T Federation – vRealize Automation can now discover global security groups configured under NSX-T global manager. These groups can be leveraged in network profiles and VMware Cloud Templates to build deployments.
  • Custom Roles API – The APIs for Custom Roles (RBAC) are now available (Create, Read, List, Update, Delete).
  • Notifications – The Service Broker administrator can view the list of available email notification scenarios and enable or disable them for all users in their organization.
  • Terraform runtime environment authentication – This release introduces authentication for adding Terraform service runtime version to vRA for more secure environments.

Resolved Issues

  • Unable to properly save variables of the Regexp type in the Variables editor
  • PowerCLI scripts fail with a “An item with the same key has already been added. Key: LinkedView” error.
  • Unable to save Property Group containing property from External Source type
  • Blueprint with invalid schema fails to import after upgrading from 8.2 to 8.4.1
  • Deployments are failing when compute tags longer than 256 characters are used
  • Cloud Template UI restricts the deployments from the same project but API does not.
  • Custom Forms ValuePicker and MultiValuePicker should not filter data when requested from getExternalValues
  • Unable to log in to the vRealize Orchestrator Control Center or the vRealize Orchestrator Appliance after using backslash (“\”) characters in the root password of your deployment.
  • Slow deletion of folders that contain large quantities of workflows or actions (over 2000 objects).
  • Error in Terraform import possibly due to for loop syntax.
  • Metrics are only loaded once when a vRO workflow is opened
  • vRO workflow fails if it contains a default error handling item and embedded workflows with nested workflows that failed.
  • Error loading values for field formValue(Value) | Unable to add or modify the value for any variables of type “Path” in vRO 7.6
  • vRO does not allow you to select a value option action for complex type input

Known Issues

  • The vRealize Orchestrator container restarts when over 5000 actions are run for the purpose of catalog item population.
  • The vRealize Orchestrator Control Center password is reset to its initial value after service redeployment.
  • vRealize Automation upgrade fails with error code LCMVRAVACONFIG90030
  • Running any action from a vRealize Orchestrator Client embedded in a vRealize Automation in an external vRealize Orchestrator deployment returns the following: Action execution with id: was not found.
  • Exceptions for READ operation are not properly processed
  • Incorrectly dropped or placed elements in Cloud Templates break the UI page
  • The vSSC photon appliance is missing libraries required to deploy Windows minions
  • Deployment created successfully but doesn’t contain any resources
  • Missing algorithmParameters for LB error not handled properly
  • When clicking on an AWS instance in the UI, the control jumps to the S3 bucket
  • Catalog service restarted

For full release notes, you can check VMware’s dedicated page.

Constantin Ghioc

I usually play with vSphere API, Ansible, vRealize Automation, vRealize Orchestrator, and different AWS tools. In my other life I’m a husband and a father, an amateur photographer and a Go enthusiast.

Leave a Reply