Book Image

Learning VMware vRealize Automation

By : SRIRAM RAJENDRAN, Sriram Rajendran
Book Image

Learning VMware vRealize Automation

By: SRIRAM RAJENDRAN, Sriram Rajendran

Overview of this book

With the growing interest in Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC), vRealize Automation offers data center users an organized service catalog and governance for administrators. This way, end users gain autonomy while the IT department stays in control, making sure security and compliance requirements are met. Learning what each component does and how they dovetail with each other will bolster your understanding of vRealize Automation. The book starts off with an introduction to the distributed architecture that has been tested and installed in large scale deployments. Implementing and configuring distributed architecture with custom certificates is unarguably a demanding task, and it will be covered next. After this, we will progress with the installation. A vRealize Automation blueprint can be prepared in multiple ways; we will focus solely on vSphere endpoint blueprint. After this, we will discuss the high availability configuration via NSX loadbalancer for vRealize Orchestrator. Finally, we end with Advanced Service Designer, which provides service architects with the ability to create advanced services and publish them as catalog items.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Learning VMware vRealize Automation
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Manager Service


The vCloud Automation Center service (commonly called the Manager Service) is a Windows .NET service that coordinates communication between DEMs, agents including guest agents (over SOAP), the IaaS database, AD (or LDAP), and SMTP. The Manager Service communicates with the repository to queue external workflows in the SQL database that will be later picked up by either a DEM worker or a proxy agent or a guest agent.

Some of the key functionalities of Manager Services are listed here:

  • Triggers inventory/state/performance data collection for the managed compute resource.

  • Processes data collection response ONLY for proxy agent-based hypervisor.

  • The master workflows (machine transition states from requested to destroy) are handled by Manager Service. For details on the life cycle states, refer the following diagram:

Tip

The grayed-out states give extensibility hooks.

A Virtual Machine Observer (VMO) task is another important task performed by Manager Service. This task is scheduled to be executed every 60 minutes to check whether any machine has expired or reached the archive state and initiates the required operations. Earlier, in the vRA 6.2 version, a VMO task was executed every 10 seconds. Since it's a resource-intensive action, it has been added as a configuration parameter in the manager service config file (ProcessLeaseWorkflowTimerCallbackIntervalMiliSeconds).

For additional details, please refer to http://pubs.vmware.com/vra-62/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.vra.system.administration.doc%2FGUID-5FBB7C73-2AAD-4106-9C0D-DE7B416A4716.html.