Vro on The IT Hollow

Execute vRO Workflow from AWS Lambda

Tue, 26 Jul 2016 14:00:15 +0000

The use cases here are open for debate, but you can setup a serverless call to vRealize Orchestrator to execute your custom orchestration tasks. Maybe you’re integrating this with an Amazon IoT button, or you want voice deployments with Amazon Echo, or maybe you’re just trying to provide access to your workflows based on a CloudWatch event in Amazon. In any case, it is possible to setup an Amazon Lambda call to execute a vRO workflow. In this post, we’ll actually build a Lambda function that executes a vRO workflow that deploys a CentOS virtual machine in vRealize Automation, but the workflow could really be anything you want.

AWS Cloud Formation Templates in vRealize Automation

Mon, 14 Mar 2016 14:15:46 +0000

Amazon has a pretty cool service that allows you to create a template for an entire set of infrastructure. This isn’t a template for a virtual machine, or even a series of virtual machines, but a whole environment. You can create a template with servers, security groups, networks and even PaaS services like their relational database service (RDS). Hey, in today’s world, infrastructure as code is the direction things are going and AWS has a pretty good solution for that already.

Veeam Package for vRealize Orchestrator

Mon, 07 Dec 2015 15:00:10 +0000

Veeam is a popular backup product for virtualized environments but who wants to spend their days adding and removing machines to backup jobs?

Now available on github is a Veeam package for vRealize Orchestrator. This is my gift to you, just in time for the Hollow-days.

Available Features

The following features are available with the plugin for it’s initial release.

Add a VM to an existing backup job
Remove a VM from a backup job
Start a backup job immediately
Add a Build Profile to vRealize Automation
Add a VM to a backup job from vRA
Remove a VM from a backup job from vRA

Some additional functionality could easily be added to your environment using the existing worfklows such as start a backup as a Day 2 operation in vRA, or change backup jobs etc. The world is your oyster.

Create a Day 2 Operations Wrapper

Mon, 16 Nov 2015 15:08:30 +0000

Just deploying virtual machines in an automated fashion is probably the most important piece of a cloud management platform, but you still need to be able to manage the machines after they’ve been deployed. In order to add more functionality to the portal, we can create post deployment “actions” that act on our virtual machine. For instance an action that snapshots a virtual machine would be a good one. We refer to these actions that take place after the provisioning process a “Day 2 Operation”, probably because it’s likely to happen on the second day or later. Clever huh?

vRealize Automation Entity Properties

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 14:19:16 +0000

A 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.

Assign a VM to a Rubrik slaDomain

Mon, 14 Sep 2015 14:00:16 +0000

This last post in the series shows you how Nick Colyer and I to tie everything together. If you want to just download the plugins and get started, please visit Github.com and import the plugins into your own vRealize Orchestrator environment.

Download the Plugin from Github

NOTE: The first version of this code has been refactored and migrated to Github in Rubrik’s Repository since the time of this initial writing

To recap where we’ve been, we:

Get Rubrik VM through vRealize Orchestrator

Thu, 10 Sep 2015 14:07:51 +0000

Part four of this series will show you how to lookup a VM in the Rubrik Hybrid Cloud appliance through the REST API by using vRealize Orchestrator. If you’d rather just download the plugin and get using it, check out the link to Github to get the plugin and don’t forget to check out Nick Colyer’s post over at systemsgame.com about how to use it.

Download the Plugin from Github

NOTE: The first version of this code has been refactored and migrated to Github in Rubrik’s Repository since the time of this initial writing

Rubrik API Logins through vRealize Orchestrator

Tue, 08 Sep 2015 14:00:17 +0000

Part three of this series focuses on how Nick Colyer and I built the authentication piece of the plugin so that we could then pass commands to the Rubrik appliance. An API requires a login just like any other portal would. Since this is a a REST API, we actually need to do a “POST” on the login resource to get ourselves an authentication token.

Download the Plugin from Github

NOTE: The first version of this code has been refactored and migrated to Github in Rubrik’s Repository since the time of this initial writing

vRealize Orchestrator REST Hosts and Operations for Rubrik

Thu, 27 Aug 2015 14:30:30 +0000

In part one of this series, we went over some basics about what REST is and the methods involved in it. In this post, we’ll add a REST host and show you how to add some REST Operations. To begin, we need to add a REST host. In plain terms, this is simply a host that will be accepting an API call. In this case, we’re adding the Rubrik Hybrid Cloud Appliance as our REST host.

Getting Started with vRealize Orchestrator and Rubrik's REST API

Tue, 25 Aug 2015 14:00:02 +0000

What’s this REST thing everyone keeps talking about?

“Oh, don’t worry, we have a REST API.”

“It’s just a simple REST call.”

At one point I was hearing these phrases and would get very frustrated. If REST is so commonplace or so simple to use, then why did I not know how to do it? If this sounds like you, then keep reading. I work for a company called “Ahead” as a consultant and they recently got a Rubrik Hybrid Cloud Appliance in their lab but my colleague Nick Colyer and I noticed that they didn’t have any vRealize Orchestrator Plugins for it. We decided to build these on our own, with the help of Chris Wahl and publish them for the community to use.

AWS Linux Guest Access via vRealize Orchestrator

Mon, 08 Jun 2015 13:27:55 +0000

It may be necessary to connect to a Linux Guest thats that been provisioned in Amazon Web Services so that you can perform additional operations on it. One of the ways you might want to configure your instances is through vRealize Orchestrator. One of the hang ups with using vRealize Orchestrator to connect to your Linux EC2 instances is that you’ll need an SSH key to connect. This post shows you how you can do this.