As a cloud administrator, you can create a Microsoft Azure cloud account for account regions to which your team will deploy vRealize Automation Cloud cloud templates.

To view an example use case of how Microsoft Azure cloud account works in vRealize Automation Cloud see WordPress end-to-end use case.

Prerequisites

Procedure

  1. Select Infrastructure > Connections > Cloud Accounts and click Add Cloud Account.
  2. Select the Microsoft Azure account type and enter credentials and other values.
  3. Click Validate.
    The account regions associated with the account are collected.
  4. Select the regions to which you want to provision this resource.
  5. For efficiency, click Create a Cloud zone for the selected regions.
  6. If you need to add tags to support a tagging strategy, enter capability tags. See How do I use tags to manage Cloud Assembly resources and deployments and Creating a tagging strategy.

    video symbolFor more information about how capability tags and constraint tags help control deployment placements, see the Constraint Tags and Placement video tutorial.

  7. Click Save.

Results

The account is added to vRealize Automation Cloud, and the selected regions are available for the specified cloud zone.

What to do next

Create infrastructure resources for this cloud account.

When you add an Azure cloud account to a cloud template, you can choose to reuse availability sets if you want. Subscriptions have a limit of 2000 availability sets and 25,000 virtual machines, so it makes sense to reuse availability sets when possible. There are two YAML properties that you can use to control how deployments use availability sets. The availabilitySetName property enables you to specify an availability set to use. The second property is doNotAttachAvailabilitySet which is set to false by default. If this property is set to true, vRealize Automation Cloud will create the deployment with no availability set.

You cannot create a deployment without an availability set if you use a load balancer attached to the virtual machine.

The following table describes how vRealize Automation Cloud behaves depending on whether a resource group and an availability set are specified in the cloud template.

An availability set cannot exist without being part of a resource group. The availability sets in a given resource group must have unique names. Availability sets can have the same name only if they are part of different resource groups.

If you do not specify a resource group name, then vRealize Automation Cloud will create a new resource group, which means that a new availability set must also be created even if a name is passed. The new set will use the name that is passed.

Table 1.
Resource Group Specified Availability Set Specified Result
No No vRealize Automation Cloud creates a new resource group and a new availability set for the virtual machine.
Yes No vRealize Automation Cloud reuses the existing resource group and creates a new availability set for the virtual machine.
No Yes vRealize Automation Cloud creates a new resource group and a new availability set with the specified name.
Yes Yes vRealize Automation Cloud reuses the existing resource group. If an availability set with the specified name already exists in that group, it will also be reused. If there is no availability set with the specified name in the group, a new one is created with that name.

Cloud Assembly supports Azure disk snapshots for deployed virtual machines. See Working with snapshots for Microsoft Azure virtual machine disks in vRealize Operations Cloud for more information.

Cloud Assembly supports several boot diagnostics options for Azure deployments. Boot diagnostics supports debugging of Azure virtual machines and includes collection of log information and relevant screenshots. See Using boot diagnostics and log analytics with a Microsoft Azure virtual machine for more information.