What caught my eye so far
Yesterday vRA 8 got released. At first look it has changed quite a bit from previous versions of vRA.
- There is no longer a need for a Windows plan, this is in line with what VMware in general is changing the last few years.
- You now need an external Identity manager, there is no longer one built into the vRA appliance.
- The product is delivered as 9GB iso file which includes the identity manager, vRA and Lifecycle Manager. The last bit shows that we are moving closer to the Cloud Foundation packaging, but also that LCM is getting to be a more serious application for handling the upgrading of your VMware applications.
- All vRA components must be deployed in the same subnet.
There are still small and large as deployment options. Both solutions requires IDM, vRA and VLMA. For large you need 3x vRA appliances and 3x Identity manager appliances. plus a load balancer for IDM and a load balancer for vRA
Orchestrator is included in the vRA deployment as usual, but you have the option to deploy an external Orchestrator component, if you should want to. It is recommended though to use the embedded vRO component.
NTP should be synced to the same clock, VMware recommends UTC+0.
Requirements:
vRA requires 8 vCPUs, 32 GB of RAM and 136 GB hdd space.
Identidy manager requires 2 vCPUs, 6 GB RAM, and 60 GB space.
The Lifecycle manager reqires 2 vCPUs, 6 GB RAM and 33 GB space.
This means that for a minimal deployment you need 12 vCPUs, 44 GB RAM and 229 GB disk space.
For a large deployment (minus the LBs) you need 3 x vRAa + 3 x IDM + 1x LCM, which equals to : 32 vCPUs, 120 GB RAM, and 621 GB harddrive space.
Supported load balancers: NSX-V, NSX-T, F5 according to the load-balancer guide.