Eric Sloof

This article describes how to configure GitLab and Action Based Extensibility Inside Cloud Assembly. The first thing to do is go to infrastructure integrations and configure GitLab Integration by specifying the URL to your GitLab server (private or public) and use the generated api token from you GitLab settings.

• Repository: vra/abx (vra is my GitLab username and abx is my GitLab project)
• Branch: Master
• Folder: Empty, this can be used when you have created an actions directory in you GitLab project
• Type: Action based scripts

You can export ABX actions from vRealize automation and upload them to Gitlab manually, just make sure you extract both the script file and the ABX file from the ZIP file and upload both files with the same name.

Hello.abx

---
exportVersion: "1"
exportId: "8a74800a7a4d348d017a56f671c70006"
name: "Hello"
runtime: "powershell"
entrypoint: "handler"
inputs:
  target: "World"
timeoutSeconds: 180
deploymentTimeoutSeconds: 600
actionType: "SCRIPT"
configuration:
  const_azure-system_managed_identity: false
memoryInMB: 300

Hello.ps1

function handler($context, $payload) {
  Write-Host "Hello World" $payload.target

  return $payload
}

However, there is an easier way, simply open an existing action in Cloud Assembly and create a new version. This will automatically upload the action to GitLab.

After a successful sync the files are available in GitLab.

An on-demand network with outbound access requires an external subnet that has outbound access. The external subnet is used to provide outbound access if requested in the cloud template - it does not control network placement. For example, the external subnet does not affect the placing of a private network.

Select an existing network that is configured on the underlying cloud provider, such as vCenter, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure. An existing network is required by the outbound on-demand network. You can define a range of static IP addresses on an existing network.

VM-DB:
    type: Cloud.Machine
    properties:
      image: VMW-DB
      flavor: VMW-Small
      networks:
        - network: '${resource["Net-DB"].id}'
          securityGroups:
            - '${resource["SG-DB"].id}'
          assignment: static
      customizationSpec: Lin-Cust
      count: 1
 
 Net-DB:
    type: Cloud.NSX.Network
    properties:
      networkType: outbound
      constraints:
        - tag: 'net:db'

In this technical paper, we discuss the VMware vSphere VM snapshot operation and its impact on the performance of guest applications and how it affects other VM provisioning operations. VMware's study explores these performance aspects in VMFS, vSAN, and vVOL environments with a variety of workloads and provides recommendations.

Download

The DRS Dump Insight web app takes existing drmdump log files (each drmdump log file contains the actions proposed and taken by DRS within a certain time or file size) and provides a summary of the DRS run, along with changes in host resource consumption in a plain text format.

With this tool, you can answer questions like:

• What recommendations did DRS drop due to cost/benefit analysis?
• Why did DRS make a certain recommendation?
• Why is DRS not making any recommendations to balance my cluster?
• How is my custom affinity/anti-affinity rule affecting load balancing in my cluster?
• Can I get all the recommendations made by DRS?

How does this tool work? DRS Dump Insight:

• Automates dump replay (with pre-built custom DRS replayers)
• Uses custom replayers to give additional info not available in regular replayer logs (like recommendations dropped due to rule conflicts)
• Parses and analyzes a custom replayed log to get insight into DRS decisions
• Generates a final summary in a plain text format

This guide describes how to use VMware vSphere DRS Dump Insight.

VMware vSphere offers three different types of clones including full clone, linked clone, and instant clone. In this paper, VMware evaluates clone performance with a variety of workloads and discuss the provisioning rates of the different clone types.

In addition, this paper provides some tips and tricks to improve the provisioning rates. Revised to include performance testing with VMware Virtual Volumes (vVOLs) and VMware vSAN.