vRealize Automation provides multi-cloud management and automation capabilities for our customers with a rich set of cloud native services out of the box. In this blog I will go over some of the latest enhancements when supporting Azure with vRealize Automation.

vRealize Automation already has quite a number of features for Azure however we have introduced three additional features which focus around images and disk management:

1. Snapshot Management for Azure Disks
2. Support for Azure Image Gallery
3. Support for Azure Disk Encryption Sets

Azure Disk Snapshot Management

Cloud Admins can now create and manage disk snapshots with Azure deployments. Create and Delete operations are supported for both managed and unmanaged disks.

In order to manage disk snapshots go to a vRealize Automation Deployment that has the snapshot:

From there you will see the actions that can be taken on the disk as well as snapshot management operations like Create Snapshot and Delete Snapshots. These snapshots will show up in the Azure Resource Group:

Then if I want to delete the snapshot it will show up in my list of snapshots in vRealize Automation:

Support for Azure Image Gallery

I am excited to announce support for Azure Shared Image Gallery. This is a great feature in Azure to allow Cloud Admins to manage images and share them more easily across their organization. With support Azure Shared Image Gallery, vRealize Automation Cloud Admins will have a better experience managing Azure from the platform.

Once you have the Azure Shared Image Gallery and a versioned image created, then you can access those images via the Image Mappings section of vRealize Automation Cloud Assembly.

Notice in the image mappings configuration under Image column there is the full path to the versioned image. You will need to specify which versioned image you want to use for that mapping. In Azure you can see your various versions:

Azure Disk Encryption Sets

vRealize Automation now supports applying Disk Encryption Sets to vRealize Automation Cloud Assembly Storage Profiles. Cloud Admins can configure vRealize Automation Cloud Assembly Storage Profiles with various storage properties like disk type, os disk caching, data disk caching. Now with Azure Storage Profiles we can configure Encryption to use an Encryption Set that was created in Azure.

The encryption set can be applied to any Virtual Machines deployed using this Storage Profile. The Encryption Set in Azure will look something like this:

vRealize Automation continues to provide value to any Cloud Management strategy with the continuing added value features for Azure and other Clouds. Thanks for reading and look for more topics coming about how vRealize Automation can help you and your organization create a consistent way to deploy into any Cloud.