Installing the all new VMware Identity Manager (vIDM) 2.4

VMware Identity Manager (vIDM) is the exciting next evolution of Workspace Portal, a critical piece within the Horizon Suite providing application provisioning, self-service catalog, conditional access controls and Single Sign-On (SSO) for SaaS, web, cloud and native mobile applications. Playing a central role in the One Cloud, Any Application, Any Device initiative, you're going to start hearing a lot more about vIDM in the coming weeks and months. To find out more about this new release, check out my vIDM announcement post.

Installing vIDM using the vSphere Web Client

NOTE: I used a beta build throughout this post so some screenshots may reference WorkspacePortal where your deployment says Identity Manager

Pre-Reqs

• Static IP


• Pre-configured DNS entry


• Active Directory


• User Authentication Methods (AD, Kerberos, RSA, etc etc)


• 2 vCPU / 6GB RAM / 24 GB Disk space (minimum)


• Port 443 must be open in Firewalls for external access


• Browsers: Chrome, Firefox, IE 10/11, Safari, Microsoft Edge (use latest available version unelss specified)

1. Deploy the downloaded OVA
   
   
   
   1. In the vSphere Web Client, right click your cluster and choose Deploy OVF Template
      
      
      
   
   
   2. Select your OVA file, Review the file details, and accept the EULA
      
      
   
   
   3. Choose your desired storage and network, then customize the deployment with the following items
      NOTE: You can enter these values in the vApp properties post-deployment if you don't want to enter them now. If you do this, be sure to UNcheck Power On After Deployment
      
      
      
      
      1. FQDN (make sure DNS forward and reverse entries exist)
      
      
      2. Default Gateway
      
      
      3. DNS Server
      
      
      4. IP Address
      
      
      5. Netmask
      
      
      
      
   
   
   4. Review all the deployment info and click Finish
      
   
   
   
   


2. Once deployment is completed, you can now power on the vApp - it will take longer during the first boot.
   NOTE: if you skipped entering the network details earlier, edit these in the vApp Properties before powering on.


3. When booting is complete, you should see a screen similar to the one below. If you see errors or the boot doesn't seem to complete, you may need to delete from disk, and attempt re-deploy.
   


4. Follow the onscreen instructions to navigate to https://<fqdn>:8443


5. Here we'll see a new yet familiar Setup Wizard
   


6. Click Next and set your passwords (make sure you document these passwords!!)
   


7. Select your Database - Internal will use an embedded PostgreSQL DB
   


8. Wait for the appliance to configure the DB and ensure there are no errors
   


9. When setup is complete, you're instructed to login to the administration console with the admin credentials you just setup
   


10. Clicking the administration console link brings you to the login page where you'll enter the admin username and password previously configured
    


11. Congratulations, you've now done the initial configuration of the vIDM appliance!
    

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Updating Appliances Offline? Sure!

// This is a guest post by Jeremy (@nakedhitman)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9OxB_k5a3w]

If you are a VMware user that has discovered the joys and simplicity of Virtual Appliances, you have probably run in to applications built on top of VMware Studio's VAMI utilities. VAMI is the background service that provides the administration page for configuring and updating VMware Studio-based appliances.



VAMI is super cool, and supports multiple upgrade methods. In addition to downloading straight from the web, there are options for secure environments to use local repositories and ISO images as your update source. As nice as this is however, there is almost no documentation for making these offline update repositories, and not every product provides an ISO image for offline use. There are a few blog posts out there that provide workarounds, but they are often more effort than they are worth if you have a lot of updates to do. Is there an easier way?

Thanks to the work of William Lam, the necessary steps to make an offline repository were at least well documented. So I set out on a mission to make this process easier, and created the VAMI Update Repository Appliance (or VURA for short). VURA is fairly straightforward. Once deployed, it will display the address of its web interface on the console and from there you can start adding repositories to it.



For every public web repository URL you give it, it will download the repository locally and serve up a mirror for it. It also will optionally create an ISO image that you can attach to your appliances and use as the update source. Once it is loaded up with repositories, you can move the VM to your internal network and use it to serve up updates to your appliances.

Since it is quite likely that multiple repositories will fill up its tiny disk, I wanted to make it easy to expand it as needed. At boot time, it will scan for new disks and automatically partition them for use as storage for the local repositories. If you plan to use this to host many repositories, all you have to do is slap a new disk on it and reboot.

If you find this project useful, please be sure to comment and share!

[contact-form to='jeremy@awesomegeek.com' subject='New comment regarding VURA!'][contact-field label='Name' type='name' required='1'/][contact-field label='Email' type='email' required='1'/][contact-field label='Website' type='url'/][contact-field label='Comment' type='textarea' required='1'/][/contact-form]

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