vRealize Business for Cloud 7.0.1 – Installation and configuration

vRealize Business has been around for a while, but i tend to find that people either don’t really know much about it, or those who have bought it as part of vCloud Suite rarely implement it, and thats a real shame because with very little time and effort you can get some really useful information out of it. So, i’m going to attempt to show you in this article how to deploy it and configure it.

In the latest version, v7, its had a slight name change, changing to vRealize Business for Cloud, but essentially its the same product. VMware are just tweaking things here and there to make people more aware of the products cloud management potential. After all, vRB can interegate more cloud platforms than just your on premise vSphere estate.

What you’ll need:

vRealize Business for Cloud v7 download from VMware.com

vRealize Automation v7 download from VMware.com

A couple of IP addresses

Admin access to vCenter

First, you need to deploy the vRealize Automation appliance. From vCenter Web Client, right click on your chosen loacation and select ‘deploy OVF template’
When the wizard begins the first thing you need to do is point it at the location of the OVA file. Select ‘locate file’ and find the file, then click ‘ok’. You should see the path appear as below. Check this is correct and click ‘next’.
The next step just really gives you a summary of the selected OVA. Just check that this is the correct product and version you are expected and click ‘next’.
Click on ‘Accept’ to accept the EULA and click ‘next’.
Chose a name for your appliance and select a folder location below. When you’ve done both of these, click ‘next’.
Select the datastore you want to deploy the appliance to and choose the disk format, then click ‘next’
Choose the required network you want to deploy to and if you want to you can enable IPv6. When you’ve done this click ‘next’.
Give you appliance a secure password and a hostname. You can also choose whether to enable SSH or not. Don’t click ‘next’ just yet. Go to step 9 first.
Click on ‘networking properties’ to expand the networking section. Enter all the reqruied settings and click ‘next’.
The last step is a summary screen. Just double check all your settings and check the box if you want to power on the apppliance when complete. Click ‘Finish’ to begin the deployment.
Now you’ve deployed the vRA appliance, you now need to deploy the vRB appliance. Kick off the deployment from the web client again and locate the vRB file. Then click ‘next’
Review the product and version and click ‘next’
Click ‘Accept’ to accept the EULA and click ‘next’
Give the appliance a name and choose the folder location. Then click ‘next’
Choose the required datastore and disk format, then click ‘next’
Choose your network and click ‘next’
Enter a secure password, choose the currency (its important not to miss this bit as it cannot be changed once deployed) and whether to enable SSH and the customer improvement program. Leave the ‘enable server’ checked. Then click ‘next’
Enter the networking properties and click ‘next’
Review the summary and choose whether to power on or not and click ‘Finish’
If you havent already, boot up both appliances. If you open the console on both you’ll see that the address to connect to them both is the https://servername:5480. First lets connect to vRA and get it configured. When the page loads you’ll be presented with a login page. Use the root user and password you set during deployment to login, then click ‘login’
Upon first login, a wizard will run to help you get up and running quicker. Click ‘next’ on the first page
Tick the box to agree to the EULA and click ‘next’
Now you need to choose the deployment type. For the purposes of this article you are only interested in getting vRealize business up and running so check the box to disable ‘Install infrastructure as a service’. This will be covered in a seperate article. When you’ve unchecked this, just click ‘next’
Enter the name of the appliance and click ‘next’
Enter a secure password for the SSO administrator
Now you have to generate or import a certificate. For the purposes of my lab i just generated a self-signed one by entering the fields and clicking ‘save generated certificate’
Once it’s generated, click ‘next’ to continue
The installation is now ready to proceed. Click ‘install’ to continue
You will now see progress as 3 sections of the install continue
Once the install has finished just check all 3 sections completed with a succeeded message, then click ‘next’
Enter a license key and click the ‘submit key’ button. Once the key is added you can click ‘next’
Choose whether to join the improvement program and click ‘next’
Thats the vRA appliance deployed. Click ‘finish’
Now you will be taken back to the login page. Log back in with the root user as before.
Click on the SSO section and verify the name of the default tenant and admin user
If you need to its possible to reset the admin SSO password here too
If you open a new browser tab and go to https://vrealizeautomationservername you will see this page. Click on the top link to access the ‘vRealize Automation console’
You will be aske to provide credentials. Enter administrator for the username and the password you entered earlier during the installation
Once logged into the appliance, the first thing you need to do is create a new tenant for vRealize Business. To do this click the green plus sign.
Enter the name of the business tenant (something obvious like ‘Business’) and a name for the URL. The description and email address are optional. Click ‘next’
Now you will be moved to the next tab where you have to create a new local user for the tenant. Again, click the green plus sign.
Enter the details for the account. All fields are madatory. Click ‘ok’
When back on the local users screen, click ‘next’ to continue.
The last section you need to fill in is the administrator account. Type in the name of the user you want to be the tenant administrator and click enter.
The user should appear in a list.
Click on it and it will be added to the box below. You can ignore the IaaS section as you don’t reqire that for this version. Click ‘finish’ to continue.
Back on the main tenant screen you should now see the default tenant and the new one you just created.
Open a new tab on your browser and go to https://vrealizebusinessservername:5480. When prompted for the username and password, enter ‘root’ and the password you set during the install. Then click ‘login’
On the page that opens you first need to register the vRealize Business appliance with vRealize automation. To do this, enter the address of the vRA appliance and the default tenant name. Then enter the vRA username and password. Once you’ve entered all this, check the box to ‘accept vRealize Automation certificate’ and then click ‘Register’. This process can take a minute so be patient. After a short delay you should see a message in green like below, saying registration was succesful.
Next you need to give the tenant user rights to access vRealize Business. To do this open a new browser tab and go to https://vraservername/vcac/org/businesstentantname and log in with the user you gave tenant rights to. You should see the same screen as below. (You may find that your admin session is still active. If this is the case you’ll need to click ‘logout’ and log back in again. Just ensure that the tenant user name shows at the top of the screen.)
Click ‘administration’, ‘users and groups’ and ‘directory users and groups’
In the search box in the top right, type in the username you added to the Business tenant and it should appear below. Click on the users name.
You should see the screen below, showing the users details and their permissions. On the right you will see a list of roles in the top box. Click on ‘business management administrator’, then click ‘next’. Just to quickly explain the difference in roles. The business management administrator as the name suggests can do whatever they like.
Leave directory groups unchanged and click ‘next’
Leave customer groups and click ‘next’
leave business groups and click ‘next’
Lastly, leave entitled items and click ‘finish’
You should see a yellow banner appear at the top of the screen like below, confirming permission changes have been made. These permissions can take a few minutes to propogate so best to wait a few mins before proceeding.
Whilst waiting for the permissons to propogate, log into the vCenter web console as your administrator@vsphere.local account, and click on ‘home’
From here, click on the ‘roles’ button.
Click on the ‘Read-only’ role and click the clone button. Rename the role ‘Business Management’ and assign the following roles: Storage views.View, Profile-driven storage.Profile-driven view and if you have integrated vRealize Operations manager add Global.vCenter Operations User, then click ‘ok’
Click on ‘users and groups’ and after ensuring the ‘vsphere.local’ is selected from the dropdown, click the green plus to add a new user.
Add a username and password as below, then click ‘ok’
Now the role and the user are created you need to delegate some permissions so that vRB can obtain data from vCenter. Change back to the hosts and clusters view and right click on the vCenter server top level object you want to delegate permissions to. Select ‘add permission’.
In the assinged role dropdown select the business management role you just created and on the left hand side, click the ‘add’ button.
Change the domain at the top to ‘vsphere.local’ and seach for the business user.
When you find it double click on it, to add it to the user section at the bottom and then click ‘ok’.
By now the vRealize Automation permissions changes should have completed applying, so first of all, click ‘logout’ in the top right of the browser window and once back at the login prompt, log back in as the same user. This is just to refresh the permissions
Your appliance will prompt you for the serial number. Enter it here and click ‘save’.
If the permissions haven’t yet propagated you’ll see the same screen as before. If you’ve given it sufficient time though, you should see a new ‘business management’ tab along the top. Click on this.
The default page of vRealize business will load. As nothing has yet been configured so you will see no costs at this point.
The first thing you need to do is point vRB at your vCenter environment/s. Click the administration tab and click ‘Business Management’. Then expand ‘manage private cloud connections’, and ‘vCenter servers’.
On the right hand side of the black box you will see plus sign. Click this to add a vCenter server.
Enter the details for your vCenter and the cloned ‘business management’ user you created earlier and assigned permissions for. When you’ve done this click ‘save’.
You may have to accept a certificate, but you should receive a success message, click ‘ok’. If you want to add multiple vCenter servers just repeat the steps to add as many as are required. Don’t forget though that you’ll need to create the role, users and assign permissions for each one.
Now you are almost ready to run a vCenter data collection, but first you need to change the way that vRB groups objects. By default, vRB sorts discovered objects by vCenter hierarchy, but it’s much more flexible to sort objects using vCenter tags. Open the vCenter web console and click on ‘home’.
Click on ‘tags’ down the left hand menu, and then click on the ‘categories’ tab.
Click the new category icon to add a new category with the name ‘Business’, then click ‘ok’. .
Click on the the ‘tags’ tab. Click the new tag icon, and call the first tag after a business area. Link it to the category ‘Business’ and then click ‘ok’.
Create as many other tags as you like, linking all of them to the business category. These could be business departments, cost centres, just any way you want to report on your objects.
Now you need to apply some or all of these tags to your vCenter objects. To do this, click on ‘hosts and clusters’, expand the tree structure down the left hand side and hover over ‘tags and customer attributes’, then click on ‘assign tag’
Select the tag you want to assign to the object and then click ‘assign’. Repeat this for as many objects as you wish.
Click on ‘pricing and charges’ down the left hand side, then click ‘business unit list’.
The screen should show only one group in the list, ‘uncategorized VMs’. Just above here, click the ‘edit’ button.
A list of solutions will appear. Locate vCenter in the list and on the very right hand side, click the pencil icon to edit it.
A new window will open showing you the default setting. Change this to ‘categorize by tags’ by clicking radio button at the side.
Then in the drop down next to it, select the ‘business’ tag family. This will ensure that vRB uses the business tag family to categorze your objects.
Click back on ‘business management’ and click ‘status’ in the top right.
A new window will open. On the middle option ‘vCenter data collection’ click ‘update now’ to the right. This will kick off a collection to test your vCenter connection is working correctly.
Once the collection is complete a last successful date/time should appear. If it doesnt after a few minutes, just close the window and manually refresh the browser.
If the collection runs successfully the refreshed page should look something like this, depending on whats in your vCenter of course.
If you click on ‘pricing and charges’ again on the left, you should be able to see that tagged objects in the business family are now popped into the correct categories and anything left untagged gets left in the uncategorized VMs section.
The final bit i’m going to show you is the cloud comparison piece. On the left hand menu, click ‘cloud comparison’ You should be take to this screen which as you can see on the left, shows ‘compare new VMs to Cloud’. Now this by default will include your private cloud and 2 public clouds. You also have the option to add a VM group which allows you to simulate adding multiple VMs. By clicking ‘manage cloud providers’ you can change the two public cloud providers compared against. On the spec of the VM you can also manually alter the spec and the costs across the three clouds will be dynamically updated.
If you click the next option down on the left, ‘compare existing VM to cloud’. This will do the same as the previous step but allows you to select any VM from your infrastructure to use as a template.
The last option on the left is ‘compare data centers’ which allows you to compare up to three of your data centres and can be used to identify cost differences which may affect your deployment. If you want to change the displayed data centres, just click ‘manage data centres’ and you can change which ones are displayed.