300+ Top Vrealize Automation Interview Questions & Answers

Below is the list of components of vRA appliance.

1. ViDM
2. Reverse Proxy
3. VRA Services
4. VRealize Orchestrator
5. Postgres Database

IaaS Web Servers are Microsoft Windows servers that host model manager services for vRealize Automation. They provide access to the MSSQL database associated with vRealize Automation for the rest of the vRealize Automation services.

The IaaS Manager Servers helps in providing the overall coordination of events within VRealize Automation.

Automation agent is a proxy service to run workflows executed by the DEM Workers against virtual endpoints such as vSphere.  These agents can be installed on the IaaS Server, or they can be installed on a separate server.

Published blueprints are service catalogs. You can publish catalog items and add them to service categories. Catalogs can be of type IaaS Catalogs like provisioning VM/Storage or other infra resources or it can be XaaS such as password reset service picked up from the VRO workflows.

You use business groups along with reservation which is percentage of compute resources reserved from the endpoint say CPU, RAM and data store from a VSphere Cluster.

Business groups are also used with entitlements because if a user is not part of a business group, you cannot entitle him to deploy a blueprint via service catalog.

Infrastructure endpoints form the core of the fabric. From the fabric, you get resources. Endpoints examples are VSphere, Hyper-V/SCVMM, AWS Cloud endpoint, Vcloud director, Storage endpoints such as Netapp, IPAM endpoints for providing Ips etc.

It is a CLI utility based on Java Runtime environment used to configure each single-tenant instance of VRealize Automation. It can be installed on any server specifically used for scripting work such as a server dedicated for power shell script. Cloud client uses certain command lets that require specific roles in VRealize Automation, and for some command lets specific credentials for successful execution. You can use with power shell and VRealize Automation APIs.

Cloud client is used for importing/exporting VRA blueprints. You can do the same things as you can do via GUI using cloud client.

Network profiles provide Virtual machines with information such as IP address, net mask, gateway, DNS, DNS suffix etc. You can associate network profile via reservation. Or while creating the blueprint on canvas, you can use it via network component.

No, VRA 7 and above architecture uses its own SSO and not of VSphere any more for single sign on.

This is a very open-ended query. Generally, XaaS (Anything as a service) uses VRO workflows and you can create XaaS catalogs via using existing workflows in VRO (say adding Microsoft AD based user to a group etc.) via VRA GUI web portal. However, the tracking of such requests does not take place. In order to do that, you need to create custom resources and if required custom actions and then use it via XaaS in order such requested items to be listed and tacked in request items.

VRA comes with VRealize Suite and with Vcloud Suite. There are other products as well with these suites.

This can be asked as this is related to access to the environment and to make it secure how you can use the roles to provide access. There are 2 system wide roles (System admin and Iaas admin). There are multiple tenant roles such as tenant admin, fabric administrator, infrastructure architect, software architect, application architect, BG manager, BG support user, approval administrator etc.

The basic logic is you can integrate either via VRA or via VRO.

For example:
Vcenter, Hyper V, NSX, IPAM tools, Storage can be integrated in this way.

AWS can be integrated via VRA->infrastructure->Add endpoint page and Azure can be integrated with VRA->Administrator->VRO endpoint path. On top of that you must install AWS, Azure or related plugin in VRO separately to use via XaaS blueprints.

We can use vRA guest agent to make the following customizations on deployed machines:

1. Change the IP address
2. Add or format drives
3. Run security scripts
4. Initialize another agent, for example Puppet or Chef.

Follow link for getting in depth information. Further on this page there are links for Windows and Linux machines as well.

Software components are basically components that you can create and then place on top of the parent blueprint. Software component can be a component for installing, configuring apache on a blueprint. Software components can also be like installing and configuring java, mongodB, IIS web server roles on windows BP etc. Logic is that in a composite blueprint first catalog for OS is deployed, then software component is deployed and then the VM request is termed as successful. In case there is a composite blueprint with say 3-4 software components are on top of it. Even if the one software component fails during the provision, entire request fails and the provisioned VM is deleted.

VRA (vRealize Business) is used for pricing and charging of VMs, operational analysis, consumption, doing cost comparisons with public clouds, doing capacity planning, what if analysis for migrations as well.

You can integrate VRB with BRA and from VRA GUI, you can see the business management tab. VRB is a separate appliance that needs to be deployed before integrating with VRB.

This is a wide topic and below links would be helpful to understand this concept. Creating XaaS Blueprints and resource actions. If you follow this you can further links for creating custom resources, custom actions, mapping custom resources to actions, some examples as well.

There are 3 roles required for admin/BG manager to be able to use Business Management tab in VRA.

1. Business Management Administrator
2. Business Management Controller
3. Business Management Read Only