vRealize Automation 7 feature a new Blueprint format. A converged blueprint can have one to many components including:
- Machines : vCenter, vCloud Air, vCloud Director, Amazon, KVM, Openstack, Citrix Xen, HyperV, SCVMM
- Network & Security: Security Group, Load balancer, NAT, Routed networks.
- Software (Install, configure, start, uninstall) : Scripts to setup the OS or to install and configure applications
- XaaS : Workflows (I.E virtual machine customization, guest operations)
Combining these allow designing complex applications.
For example using the vRealize Automation design canvas you can put together a multiple instance machine to deploy cluster nodes with an XaaS components to create shared disks and software components to install and configure the Operating System, and application layers.
All these components are bound together via data bindings that will determine the parameters flow and deployment order.
While you can design your application from scratch being able to leverage community blueprint will save you a lot of time learning from other community members designs, and application scripts.
VMware Sample Exchange is a VMware and community content repository. From this site you can download sample code, automation scripts, Orchestration workflows and also vRealize Automation 7 application Blueprints. You can also create your own content and upload it to sample exchange to share it with the community.
At the moment there are about a dozen application blueprints available with new ones uploaded in a regular basis.
A blueprint is a YAML formatted file packaged within a zip file that can be downloaded with your browser. For importing it in vRealize Automation VMware provides a command line tool called vRealize CloudClient.
There is also a more convenient way to import Sample Exchange blueprints directly from the vRealize Automation service catalog with using a workflow I have released on the vRealize Orchestrator community.
With all these new capabilities integrated in vRealize Automation 7 you have the ability to design, publish and exchange advanced application blueprints.
To know more about designing a vRealize 7 application blueprint you can check this video.
