Intro:
Been playing around with VMware vRealize Automation vRa 7 for some time now and I was wondering where would I find the switch to change the landing page to a default tenant rather than the default landing page. I realize this would break the whole concept of different tenants thus different pages but for the sake of testing I wanted users directly to hit the default tenant page login of vsphere.local .
I realize this switch might actually exist somewhere or a redirect can be created inside vRa by editing the landing page site config never the less I have decided to use Citrix NetScaler rewrite feature to automate this task and might be usefull to others with different scenarios.
Issue:
By default when users access the landing page of vRa https://vra.diyarunited.com , many options are presented, one of which is to go to the default tenant login page. My aim here is to automate that redirect thus users accesing the vRa will directly land at https://vra.diyarunited.com/vcac/vsphere.local . NetScaler rewrite feature is going to be used for this task and just incase you are looking to redirect to a completely new URL then you might consider Responder feature instead. Needless to say vsphere.local is default tenant but again you can change that and redirect to any new tenant you have created.
Resolution:
1- Enable Rewrite Feature on NetScaler.
2- Virtual Server with service pointing to vRa needs to be created on NetScaler in order to apply the rewrite policy. Lets first create the vRa service and point to the vRa IP and protocol.
3- Create a Virtual Server with new IP and Point to vRa service just created on NetScaler. Make sure your certificate is added with vRa hostname and make sure your Natting if accesible from outside to point to the virtual server IP on top of your DNS internal point to the virtual server IP.
4- Create the Rewrite Action and Rewrite Policy. In the Rewrite action we are going to state what we want to add to the actual URL so since I am redirecting to the default tenant, I would add the following to the original URL “/vcac” If it was a different tenant than the default the expression would be “/vcac/tenantname”
Add New Action. Expression target location: HTTP.REQ.URL . Expression: “/vcac” .
Add New Policy. Expression: HTTP.REQ.URL.EQ(“/”)
5- Assign newly created Rewrite Policy to vRa Virtual Server.
6- TTT ( Time To Test ) , https://vra.diyarunited.com is directing to vRa virtual server on NetScaler while the original IP of vRa is https://10.20.34.64 thus let us test each URL default landing page. This is the default landing page of vRa, I will have to press on Access vRealize Automation to get to the tenant login page.
This is the default tenant page which we directly landed on using the vRa LB virtual server and rewrite policy.
Salam 🙂 .