I was recently tasked with integrating Infoblox into vRA Cloud. There didn’t seem to be a lot of information on this so I thought I would write a blog post 🙂 Hopefully others find it useful.

This article will make assumptions that you are familiar with vRA Cloud and that you already have an IP range setup in Infoblox. Actually, the process to integrate is very simple , however we do have some pre-requisites that we need to deliver before we can begin. Make sure that you have downloaded the ABX plugin from  https://marketplace.vmware.com/vsx/solutions/cas-infoblox-plugin-for-abx-0-0-1 and also ensure you add the following extensibility attributes in Infoblox:

• VMware NIC index (Integer)
• VMware resource ID (String)
• Tenant ID (String)
• CMP Type (String)
• VM ID (String)
• VM Name (String)

You may have to reach out to your network admin to add these if you don’t have access to the Infoblox console, however this is also pretty simple. Logon to the admin console and browse to Administration -> Extensible Attributes and add each of the above

Ok, now you are ready to go. Once you are logged into vRA Cloud, browse to Infrastructure -> Integrations and select the “Extensibility Actions On Prem” Option

Next, click on “NEW CLOUD EXTENSIBILITY PROXY”

Download the OVA and deploy on your endpoint vCenter. This is a very simple process and if you are using vRA Cloud you would have already deployed the Cloud Proxy, so the same process applies as all VMware OVA deployments

Once it is deployed, we can select this Cloud Extensibility Proxy from the drop down menu. Give the proxy a name and click on validate to ensure connectivity is OK. Save your changes

Now that we have our ABX proxy installed and running, we can add the Infoblox integration. Once again browse to Integrations and this time select IPAM

Click on “MANAGE IPAM PROVIDERS”

We can now import the Infoblox package by Selecting “IMPORT PROVIDER PACKAGE” Browse to the location you have saved it and import.

Once you have this imported, use this as the provider.

Select the running environment, which is the on prem extensibility integration you have just created. Populate the username and password for the Infoblox appliance and supply the hostname of it. Give your integration a name and validate the credentials

Once you have saved your IPAM integration, browse to Infrastructure -> Networks -> IP Ranges and select “ADD IPAM IP RANGE”

Select the port group you want the IPAM IP range to be associated with. Select the Infoblox integration endpoint that you created as the provider. The IPAM address spaces will now load. Simply select the range you click ADD

When the IP range is added, it will be assigned a capability tag by default. You can view this by clicking on the IP ranges tab. In our example we can see that the tag is “range-type:network”.

Next, we need to create a network profile for our blueprints to utilize. Browse to Infrastructure -> Network Profile and add a new profile. Select the Account/Region where you wish the VM to be deployed, give the profile a name and add the capability tags which where assigned to the IP range when it was added.

Click on the Networks tab and add a new network. Note that you may need to update the filter on the top right, which defaults to NSX networks.

Once you have selected your network, click save

Finally, we now need to update our blueprint with our new tag that is associated with our network profile and network.

And there you have it, we have now integrated Infoblox into vRA Cloud. A simple process but some of the steps can easily be missed which can cause issues during your deployment. One final thing to note, once you have deployed your VM, you can click on Extensibility -> Action Runs. In here you will find integration code which is triggered for each event. We want to find “Infoblox_AllocateIP”.

Checking the logs and Trace in here may be very beneficial when you are troubleshooting any issues with IP Allocation.