We did 100s of VMware installs so you don’t have to.
It’s no secret that RackN delivers Consistent Day 2 VMware Operations and makes Easy VMware Installs for our operators. That’s critical to our customers who have deployed VMware automatically using RackN Digital Rebar processes hundreds of thousands of times across their global fleets. And with VMworld Explore 2022 around the corner, we’re excited to show what’s new with our industry-leading build and provision automation for VMware .
Throw away those Cloud Builder spreadsheets!
With our upcoming v4.11 release, you can finally trade your Cloud Builder spreadsheets in for an API-driven VMware vCenter bring up. This means you can eliminate the manual parts of VMware deployments. We’re already delivering the Digital Rebar modules required to customers, and are excited to roll them out to everyone.
What can Digital Rebar do for VMware Cloud Builder?
Building on our standardized ESXi deploy pipeline, bare metal configuration, Digital Rebar orchestration, and literally 100s of lab installs, we’ve automated the deployment of the VCF Cloud Builder Appliance.
“We take the Cloud Builder JSON spec, and then, via the API using our context systems, bootstrap the vCF Cluster Builder. That path includes API health checks and running the appliance’s validation APIs against the CloudBuilder bringup.JSON file. Operators just initiate the create command and, boom, wait till it’s done!”
Shane Gibson, RackN Senior Solution Architect
This means Digital Rebar gives you the ability to automate Cloud Builder from outside of the appliance via the API – no spread sheets are required. Our deployment process loads the Cloud Builder OVA on an ESXi host, bootstraps it, and launches the cloud builder. Then Digital Rebar supervises the process to launch and configure the Cloud Builder API endpoint appliance with VMware Cloud Foundation. Once that’s ready, Digital Rebar will build up vCenter by injecting resources into the Bringup.JSON specification.
Extended Day 1/Day 2 VMware processes
In addition to Cloud Builder, we’ve also extended our Day 1 and 2 VMware processes based on vmlib and other VMware tools. If you have existing clusters, these processes allow you to define a Softwar-Defined Data Center (SDDC), create a cluster, enroll the ESXi hosts into the cluster, and even do a vSAN build out. For customers with very demanding needs, these stand alone processes can be used to extend, or even replace, Cloud Builder.
Real Talk
Through RackN Digital Rebar, VMware operators are able to truly realize the promise of a SoftwareDefined Data Center. You can read more about our VMware integration or try it yourself at RackN.com/trial
