vRealize Automation 8 was released last week and I wanted to share with you how to do the installation of that new version.

Like I stated in a previous blog post, vRA 8 comes in a brand new platform built on a container-based architecture running on Photon OS 2.0.

As you know, no more Windows machines is required but the vRA 8 appliance includes all the services such as Cloud Assembly, Service Broker, Code Stream, and vRealize Orchestrator that leverage the main product.

There are some prerequisites before installing vRA 8. You will have first to deploy the Lifecycle Manager and then the Identity Manager. Know that you can also migrate earlier version of LCM and IDM if you have older version running in your environment. However it is not possible to install each component by deploying their respective OVA files.

Let the installation begins!

First, you’ll have to choose either to do a new install or to migrate an existing instance of the vRSLCM (vRealize Suite Life Cycle Manager). Here we’re going to do a new installation.

Once you click on “Install” the next screen will give you an introduction of what the vRealize Easy Installer does and the components it is going to install.

Then accept the classic “End User License Agreement” and join the “VMware Customer Experience Improvement Program” if you want to.

And now you can finally start filling in all the details of your appliances. First we’re gonna specify the vCenter Server details on which we’re installing our applicances.

Accept the certificate warning if it is trusted.

Now select a location, so either a Data center or a VM folder.

Then choose the compute ressources where your applicances will be deployed.

Select an appropriate datastore in your vSphere environement.

Finally, provide network details for all products.

Set a password for all products. This password will be used with the local admin user or root user for each product.

Now type a VM name for the LCM, an IP address and a hostname.

Do the same for the IDM (Identity Manager).

And finish with the vRA configuration by providing a license key and all the other details.

Note also that it is possible for more redundancy to have a three node configuration (Cluster Deployment) that will be behind a load balancer. A 2 node configuration is not supported with vRA 8.

Once you’re done with the configuration details, you end up with a summary of everything you put in. If it’s all good to you then you can click on “Submit” to begin the deployment.

Below is the installation process bar that appears to show you the current status of your deployment.

Note that once you’re reached the “Moving Binaries” step, you can click on the URL to start navigation through the vRSLCM UI.

Here’s the vRSLCM login page.

Et Voila! You’re first step into vRSLCM.

Here is the “Environments” menu where any deployment in progress appears, and you can see that vRA is still being deployed.

You can also by clicking on the “Products” button, see all the supported products with the version that can be installed within LCM and be part of the vRSLCM.

Once the vRA installation is completed, you can go directly to the login page from the installation process bar.

You can now log into the vRA 8 login page and start to configure your new environment.

As you can see, VMWare has done a great job to simplify the deployment and installation of the three products and especially vRA 8 which resides now within a single appliance. It should take you no more than one hour to have everything in place.

This is a great achievement compared to what we had back then with vRA 6 and 7. I hope you guys liked this blog post as more will come soon and enjoy vRA 8.