vRealize Automation 7.4 has landed!

Today vRealize Automation 7.4 became available.  As usual there are plenty of bug fixes listed in the release notes but there are really two cool additional features that I am anxious to play with.

You can access the product through your My VMware portal.

Custom Request Forms Designer

When leveraging Custom Forms, designer blueprint architects are able to apply the following logic to the blueprint request form:

  • Drag-and-drop controls and custom properties on the canvas
  • Leverage blueprint schema – blueprint properties, custom properties, and profiles
  • Use generated forms
  • Save, clear, and revert customized forms
  • Dynamically show or hide fields based on custom conditional logic
  • Auto-fill and dynamically populate input values based on external and internal logic
  • Use internal dependencies and external call outs with vRealize Orchestrator
  • Apply constraints to input values
  • Apply custom validation using regular expressions
  • Apply custom help text and error messages
  • Choose vRealize Orchestrator inventory objects
  • Support for complex types like disk volumes and vRealize Orchestrator composite types
  • Use advanced formatting and apply custom CSS to the blueprint request form
  • Automatic form validation of blueprint definition during design time
  • Export and import of customized form through GUI and CLI

Right now, you can include custom properties on blueprints and show them on the request, but you cannot really modify the request form very much without getting very custom into things (which in turn is not very universal).  Now, the vRealize Automation team has provided the ability to customize the request form.  One thing I’ve been wanting is the ability to just add simple text to the form and this has been added!  You can now provide a brief instruction or example in the request form so that people can better understand what they should put.  For instance, if your business has a hostname/VM name standard, you could suggest (or even validate/constrain) a machine name as an example for the user to input as a guideline.  Very cool.

Deploy from OVF

  • New provisioning option to deploy vSphere blueprints from an OVF or OVA
  • Specify URL to the OVF location with authentication and proxy options available
  • Support for advanced configuration options in the form of custom properties specific to the OVF
  • Support for parameterization with the image component profile

Deploying from OVF offers more flexibility.  Or, maybe it provides less since that’s the idea of an OVF/OVA.  Either way, being able to roll out pre-built OVF/OVA templates is great especially if the OVF is hosted/maintained on a vendor website or similar.  No need to deploy the OVF to a VM, make a template, hook that into vRA, etc.  Just configure the OVF for deployment right out of the box!

There are some decent fixes included but also some known issues, especially involving Azure endpoints so if you rely on Azure for your environment do check out the release notes and see if the workarounds for some of the known issues apply to your environment

I’ll show you how to upgrade your existing vRA 7.3 environment to 7.4, but as always check out the official documentation for vRealize Automation 7.4

Update 4-13-2018:  The default repository now shows Appliance Version 7.4.0.645 Build 8229492 as an available update so you don’t need to use an update repository ISO:

Thanks for reading!

Author: Jon

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