During this Greenfield deployment of my home lab, I’m going to be rolling with the latest Aria Easy Installer, like its predecessor (vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager) this too includes initial deployment of the Aria LCM appliance, Aria Automation & VMware Identity Manager.
I’ve performed some pre-requisite work such as reserving IP’s, Forward and Reverse DNS entries, and will be deploying this on a 3-node vSAN ESA cluster. The steps below will be using the Windows UI interface of the installer.
Ensure you check out the latest Release Notes for Aria Suite Lifecycle 8.12 and if you would like to learn more about Aria Suite, be sure to check out VMware’s site: Aria Platform Lifecycle
Click Install
These are the products that are part of the initial deployment of the Aria Suite
The next screen will be to Accept EULA or CEIP (optional)
For the ‘Appliance Deployment Target’ you will want to connect to a vCenter Server, if you want to take additional security measures and avoid using default @vsphere.local accounts, you may create one in vCenter and use that for the association. The following document provides the details on the permissions; VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle: Assign a user role in Center
I will be using an AD account I’ve created and because my LDAP is the default Identity Source, I just have to put the user account and not append domain.
On the next screen select ‘Compute Resource’ and click Next.
For our install we will be installing it on our vSAN datastore
Next screen will be ‘Network Configuration’
For the ‘Password’ Configuration ensure you document everything this password is used for. This is critical for future troubleshooting, lifecycle and if you are doing any kind of password rotation.
Populate information regarding initial appliance deployment for Aria LCM
The next step is the Identity Manager Configuration, there is an option to import a version deployed outside of Easy Installer and there are additional options below regarding syncing Active Directory.
The final configuration is for Aria Automation Part 1
Aria Automation Part 2
The final part will be to kick-off and monitor the installation. You should notice your vCenter will begin deploying VMs.
The status now shows it completed successfully, I had 3 VMs deployed (your results may vary if you configured clustered options for your appliances.
Once completed you can verify accessibility to all the appliances, below is the splash page when logging on to Aria LCM
