vRealize Automation provides self-service provisioning, IT services delivery, and life cycle management of cloud services across many multi-vendor virtual, physical, and cloud platforms using a flexible distributed architecture. vRealize Automation provides a secure portal where authorized administrators, developers, and business users can request new IT services and manage existing system resources from predefined user-specific service catalog. The two main functional elements of the architecture are the vRealize Automation appliance and the IaaS components.

Figure 44.          vRealize Automation Components

Before deploying the vRealize Automation suite from SDDC Manger, the vRealize Lifecycle Manger must be deployed from SDDC Manager. It is used to deploy and Lifecycle the vRealize Suite components. There are additional requirements for an external Microsoft SQL server and an IaaS Windows server OVA Template. Read the Requirements for vRealize Automation documentation for all the requirements that must be met before a vRealize Automation deployment can be initiated from SDDC Manager.

Note: The vRealize Suite is deployed to a VLAN backed network. If these management components are going to be protected in a multi-site DR configuration, you must migrate the networking to NSX logical switches. This might also be desirable for a multi-site with stretched cluster.