A technical series covering vRealize Automation (vRA) and vRealize Application Services configurations, home lab upgrades, and related EMC Community Edition installations.
Step-by-step notes on upgrading vRealize Application Services inside a home lab, covering prerequisites, component checks, and post-upgrade validation.
Examples referenced across the series include upgrading vRealize Application Services and Automation home labs together, with practical guidance drawn from earlier 2015-era lab work.
The vRA Series on Virtxpert is framed as a long-running technical track that walks through real-world vRealize Automation and vRealize Application Services configurations, often grounded in a personal home lab rather than a polished enterprise environment. The tone mirrors the broader blog identity: practical, opinionated, and willing to document both the wins and the friction points that come with upgrading complex automation stacks. Readers following the series get a sense of how component versions interact and what to watch for when moving from one release to the next.
The Home Lab posts sit at the heart of the series, treating the lab as a legitimate engineering environment rather than a toy. They generally cover the unglamorous steps that make a deployment work: provisioning storage, configuring networking, sizing memory and drives, and getting virtual appliances talking to each other. Because the lab is nested on top of an existing hypervisor, the write-ups also explore the interplay between ESXi hosts, virtual appliances, and the broader vSphere stack in a way that resonates with readers building their own environments at home.
Related entries broaden the scope beyond pure automation, touching on ecosystem pieces like EMC Community Edition installations, ansible playbooks, and general sysadmin housekeeping. This reflects the blog's wider habit of mixing deep dives with shorter notes that capture a single idea before it scrolls past the feed. The cumulative effect is a series that reads less like a formal product guide and more like a working notebook, inviting readers to adapt the patterns to their own labs rather than copy them verbatim.
Companion guides for vRealize Automation upgrades, walking through IaaS components, repository configuration, and tenant alignment after upgrade.
The series links to VMware documentation for vRealize Automation 6.2 as a reference point while planning a lab upgrade path.
The series also references the $1,250 8-Core / 32GB / 750GB Flash / 2TB HDD 2015 Edition home lab build that underpins many of the upgrade walkthroughs.
| Component | Specification |
|---|---|
| CPU | 8 cores |
| Memory | 32 GB |
| Fast storage | 750 GB flash |
| Capacity storage | 2 TB HDD |
| Edition year | 2015 |
This series is written by Jonathan Frappier, author of VMware vSphere Resource Management Essentials published by Packt Publishing, and is part of the broader Virtxpert blog covering VMware, virtualization, and IT infrastructure topics.