Automation

On March 27, 2020, VMware released the second hotfix for vRealize Automation 8.0.1. Included in it are sixty-three fixes for items relating to the Provisioning, vRealize Orchestrator (vRO), vRealize CodeStream, and Virtual appliance/clustering. The hotfix can be installed using vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.0.1. It is recommended to install vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.0.1 Patch 1 before installing vRealize Automation 8.0.1 Hotfix 2 (Build 8.0.1.7482). For complete details on the items that have been resolved with this hotfix, review the VMware KB article Cumulative Update for vRealize Automation 8.

While vRealize Automation 8.0 may be the hot new cloud management platform from VMware, vRealize Automation 7.6 still enjoys widespread usage due to its long life and rich feature set. As such, VMware continues to provide bug fixes for vRealize Automation 7.6. Continuing this trend, VMware recently released Hotfix 3 for vRealize Automation 7.6 on February 25, 2020. This cumulative update brings us fixes for 14 separate issues relating to performance, UI, vRealize Operations integration, and adds support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.

If you’re like most large IT environments, a device naming standard is common to maintain order on your network when deploying new devices. Some IT environments utilize simple naming standards, while others are complex and might vary depending on location, device type, device usage, or some other abstract reason. vRealize Automation 8 introduced significant improvements over vRealize Automation 7 when it comes to machine naming including support for naming templates based on:

When it comes to vRealize Automation 8.0, VMware has been moving full steam ahead with rapid product updates containing new features, capabilities, and bug fixes. Continuing this trend, on January 17, 2020, VMware released the first hotfix for vRealize Automation 8.0.1. Included in it are three enhancements, ten improvements, and fifteen fixes for items relating to the IaaS API, Provisioning, Action-based extensibility (ABX), vRealize Orchestrator (vRO), and Virtual appliance/clustering. The hotfix can be installed using vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.

VMware has released a new update to vRealize Automation 8.0, bringing with it new features, as well as improvements and bug fixes. Unfortunately, vRealize Automation 8.0.1 still does not provide an upgrade/migration path from 7.x to 8.0. We likely will not see upgrade/migration functionality until version 8.1. New features in this release include: Migration from vRealize Automation 7.5 or 7.6 assessment vRealize Automation Migration Assessment Offline Capture Utility 1.0.0 allows you to collect data from your vRealize Automation, vRealize Orchestrator, or external vRealize Orchestrator source environment offline.