Author: Eiad Al-Aqqad

  • vRealize Automation Modifying Approval E-mails

    One of the questions I get often asked by customers is how to modify vRA e-mail templates. To be honest the most one customers usually care to modify is the Approval e-mail to include more information than what is provided in the out of the box template. In this article, I will show you how…

  • Free VMTurbo Datacenter Stencils for Microsoft Visio and OmniGraffle

    If you often create Architecture Diagrams using Microsoft Visio or OmniGraffle, then you are always in the look for new stencils and shapes that you can reuse into your design. VMturbo has just released a good Datacenter Stencils that work for both Microsoft Visio and OmniGraffle. The free VMturbo  Topology Stencils covers all of the…

  • How to Downgrade VM Hardware Version

    I have often got the question if you can downgrade your Virtual Machine Hardware version from the latest version to a previous version. There is many reasons why you might want to downgrade your VM Hardware Version, but below is few common ones I have heard: VM hardware version you upgraded to is not supported…

  • My Home Lab Converged Infrastructure Challenge

    As I had some challenges with my Home Lab due to some hardware failure, I had to revert from using a dedicated storage box (White box + Windows + bunch of disk + StarWind Virtual SAN) as I no longer have the luxury of having that extra machine to use. I have ended up with…

  • vRealize Automation Gugent stuck and machine deployment timeout

    After installing the vRA 6.2.2 Gugent into our Windows 2012 R2 template, blueprint deployment started to time out. As I had followed the exact steps I have previously used to install the Gugent for quite few customers before which in turn I have already documented on my following blog post: vRA Guest Agent Installation, I was…

  • vRealize Automation deployment to vCloud Air fails

    After configuring vRealize Automation Center to be ready to deploy to vCloud Air (End Point, Fabric Group, Reservation, Reservation Policy, Blueprints, etc), my initial vAPP blueprint deployment to vCloud Air has started to fail with the below error message. “Request failed: Machine VTTest001: an error occurred while customizing the vapp..”   Checking the vRA logs…

  • Unable to establish an SSL connection with vCenter Server

    While trying to export one of my VMs into OVF from my virtual infrastructure using the vSphere Web Client, I kept getting the following error:  “Could not connect to the remote resource: SSL connect error”. I have as well tested to import OVF templates into my VMware vSphere environment, and I was getting the same error,…

  • Last chance to win your VMworld 2015 Ticket from VMTurbo

    If you still have not got your VMworld 2015 ticket, it is not yet the time to quit your hunting for a free VMworld ticket. VMTurbo is still offering you the chance to win one of a pair of Two VMworld 2015 tickets through their sweepstakes taking place on July 9th. VMworld is the most…

  • vRealize Automation iaas-service does not register after installation

    While doing the usual vRA 6.2.2 large deployment distributed install, and after everything in the installation went smoothly without any errors, the vRA infrastructure tab was not working. Checking the vRA Services through the vRA Appliance VAMI, and noticed all of my services are up and running as  expected with its status being registered, beside the…

  • VMware vSphere Mobile Watchlist features

    Did you ever want to manage or monitor your vSphere infrastructure from your mobile device? You are in luck, VMware has a mobile application available for Android and iOS which helps you to manage virtual machines and hosts on your vSphere infrastructure . While this application is optimized for smartphones, it will work on tablets too.…

  • vRealize Automation 6.2 moving to Internal replicated vPostgres

    When delivering a vRealize Automation 6.1 and prior in a distributed install, the recommendation was always to have an external vPostgres instance. This has changed in vRealize Automation 6.2 and it’s briefly touched upon in the vRA 6.2 reference architecture found at: vRealize Automation 6.2 reference Architecture. I wanted to make sure to highlight this,…

  • Resource Actions does not show up in vRealize Automation 6.2.1

    I had an instance of vRealize Automation 6.2 with few resource actions that were built under Advanced Services with things like take snapshot and move VMs to a different folder in vCenter. These were working like a charm in vRealize Automation 6.2, but as soon I upgraded to 6.2.1 they stopped showing in the items…

  • No Excuse for not having backup!

    If you are working in the SMB market, you might be facing with the usual challenge of having a very limited to no budget for backup. Please don’t take that as an excuse to skip backup all together, as your management will not tolerate not having backup when things go south. It’s important to recognize…

  • How to change the certs for VAMI on VMware vCAC Appliance

    I have been working with several customers & after changing the certs for things like vRealize Auotmation using VAMI, they notice that when they access VAMI at port 5480 (ex: https://vra.vt.com:5480), they noticed they still get the self signed cert instead of the signed cert they have installed. The reason for that is the cert that…

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 & vCenter Customization Specifications

    While on a vRealize Automation 6.2 engagement, the customer wanted to be able to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 VMs from a blueprint. The customer has prepared a RHEL 7 Template for me to use for deployment. I have created as well a vCenter Customization Specification to customize the VM and apply the desired IP…