Automation

It seems like it wasn’t too long ago that I posted that Patch 3 had been released for vRealize Automation 7.6 (technically it was March 2, 2020). Since then, VMware has been quite busy resolving various issues within vRealize Automation 7.6 and have released 11 additional patches as well as 2 cumulative security updates. Patch 14 for vRealize Automation 7.6 was released by VMware on September 22, 2020, and only contains 1 fix related to “Email notifications fail to work properly over time requiring service restarts”.

On July 24, 2020, VMware released the second patch for vRealize Automation 8.1. Patch 2 including forty-eight fixes for Provisioning, the Service Broker, vRealize CodeStream, Identity, vRealize Orchestrator, and virtual appliance/clustering. The hotfix can be installed using vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.1. It is recommended to install vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.1 Patch 1 before installing vRealize Automation 8.1 Patch 2 (8.1.0.9583). For complete details on the items that have been resolved with this hotfix, review the VMware KB article Cumulative Update for vRealize Automation 8.

VMware’s vRealize Operations is an excellent monitoring, analytics, and self-driving IT operations platform that supports numerous applications and infrastructure systems out of the box. Management packs are available from both VMware and third-parties to extend these out of the box capabilities to a wide variety of additional applications and infrastructure systems. Unfortunately, management packs aren’t available for every hardware device that you might need to monitor. In these situations, monitoring via SNMP might be your only choice.

It seems like it was just a few days ago that I was posting that vRealize Automation 8.0.1 Hotfix 2 was available. In reality, it was precisely 15 days ago. Nevertheless, on April 16, 2020, VMware released the third hotfix for vRealize Automation 8.0.1. Hotfix 3 (20 days after Hotfix 2) including seven fixes for Provisioning, the Service Broker, and vRealize CodeStream. The hotfix can be installed using vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.

In the early days of VMware ESX and VirtualCenter Server (now called vCenter Server), patching and upgrading ESX hosts was a manual and challenging task that required a significant amount of time from a virtual administrator to complete. This process included manually staging patch files as well as executing install and reboot commands to each ESX host. To simplify virtual infrastructure management, in 2007, VMware introduced a new feature with VMware VirtualCenter Server 2.