VMware Cloud Foundation has become widely adopted by many customers. The popularity of VCF has driven a much wider adoption of vRealize Automation and the associated products that go into the vRealize Suite.
Most organisations want to automate as much as possible. And there are several tools available that can make that happen.
One of the most important aspects of a successful cloud implementation is having a robust backup strategy, and DellEMC`s PowerProtect software and dedicated appliances can help you achieve that goal.
DellEMC PowerProtect is the future-proofed enterprise backup and recovery software with dedicated appliances available. I am not going to get into the details of PowerProtect in this post, as that is worth a series of posts all by itself. Instead I wanted to show how you can protect your vRealize Automation deployed virtual machines in an out of the box-automated manner, without the need for vRA / vRO scripting or automation workflows.
What makes this possible are the recent changes to the vRA architecture as is applies to multi-tenancy with the use of resource-pools in vCenter.
Resource pools are a way to organize virtual machines and isolate compute resources from other objects in vCenter. When you add your vCenter to vRA, vRA will import resource pools that you have created in vCenter and you can add these to your cloud templates and have your provisioned VM`s land into these once they are deployed.
But how can we use these to resource pools to "trigger" automatic backups in PowerProtect?
In PowerProtect, go to Protect Policies > Select Policy > Edit.
Select Assets to view the vCenter VMs to add into the protection policy. The key here is to select the resource pool as the top level object. New VMs that are deployed into this resource pool will automatically be added to the protection policy, as vCenter will update PowerProtect with the new VM once it is in inventory.
When you view the VM in vCenter, you can see that it has been added into the protection policy without the need to add it manually after the VM has been deployed.
This is a quick, out of the box way to protect your VMs in an automated way. One less task to do for the SDDC admin, one step closer to self-driving infrastructure. There are more advanced backup features and functionalities that can be done with PowerProtect + vRealize Suite, this being the "easiest". I will be documenting those in future posts.
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