vRealize Automation Entity Properties
October 5, 2015A common task that comes up during an automation engagement relates to passing values from vRealize Automation blueprints over to vRealize Orchestrator. There is a workflow that I use quite frequently that will list the properties available for further programming and you can download the plugin at github.com if you’d like to use it as well.
How it works
The workflow takes several inputs that are provided by vRealize Automation during a stub like Building Machine, Machine Provisioned or Machine Disposing. These inputs include the vRA Virtual Machine instance, the vCenter Virtual Machine ID, the vRealize Automation Host, the stubs used and most importantly the vRealize Automation VM properties.
The workflow itself is a single scriptable task that could be converted into an action of you so prefer.
The main goal for this task is to log the property information of the virtual machine as it’s being provisioned or destroyed. You can see below there are properties such as VirtualMachine.Memory.Size property value and its set to 1024.
One of the additional attributes that can be set on the workflow is the “OutputProperty”. This can be set prior to any stubs being executed and will output whatever property you want as an output variable that can be passed to further workflow actions. For instance the screenshot below will pass the VirtualMachine.Network0.Name as an output so that you can update an IPAM solution or something. You can change this setting to match any property retrieved from the plugin.
In vRealize Automation you will need to add a stub property and update the value to match the workflow in vRealize Orchestrator. This will ensure that the workflow gets called during the stub process.
It is also possible to run the workflow manually, but you’ll need to fill in the input parameters yourself.
Summary
This workflow doesn’t accomplish any specific task, but it will allow you to get the properties of the virtual machine you’re provisioning through vRealize Automation. Once you get those properties, your imagination is the limit about what kind of workflows that can be run by using them. I hope this plugin helps someone else that is struggling with getting this information over to vRO.
