Posts

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 ...

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 ...

VMware announced Site Recovery Manager version 6.1 this week at VMworld in San Francisco California. Several new features were unveiled for VMware’s flagship Disaster Recovery product. Storage Profile Protection Groups Remember back in the old days (prior to today), when deploying a new virtual machine we had to ensure the datastore we were putting the virtual machine on was replicated? Not only that, but if this new VM was part of a group of similar VMs that needed to fail over together, we needed to make sure it was in the same protection group? Well VMware decided this was a cumbersome process and added “Storage Profile Protection Groups”. ...

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. ...

What’s this REST thing everyone keeps talking about? “Oh, don’t worry, we have a REST API.” or “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. ...

What’s this REST thing everyone keeps talking about? “Oh, don’t worry, we have a REST API.” or “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. ...

I ran into that funny problem where if you have so many wireless devices you’re overloading your tiny wireless router that you’ve had for 5 years. After looking around a bit I settled on the AC3200 Triband Router from Linksys. I wanted something that would be really powerful to handle all of my devices and something with a cool factor. The device arrived and had some simple instructions to configure it. Connect to the default SSID via a wireless device and open up your web browser to myrouter.local to get connected. The setup had a “Quick Setup” mode to get everything running quickly but I found that the quick setup would not work for my environment. The quick setup expects that you’ve connected your Wireless Router directly to a cable modem and in my case I’m connected to a layer three switch behind an ASA firewall. After resetting the router and doing the manual setup though, everything was good. ...

When you execute a Cisco UCS Director workflow you’re usually prompted to enter in some information. Usually this is something like a virtual machine name, or an IP Address, even some credentials possibly. The values that you enter can be formatted so that they come from a list and the user just has to select the right value. This helps immensely in the amount of troubleshooting you have to do because only specific verified values can be displayed. ...

Infoblox is a pretty popular IP Address Management (IPAM) solution for many shops. Wouldn’t it be nice to integrate your automation solution such as vRealize Automation, with your existing IPAM system? Well, don’t worry. You can! Infoblox Setup This post isn’t going to go into great detail about the setup of the Infoblox appliance but we do need to make sure that we’re licensed for API usage correctly. Ensure that the infoblox appliance has the “Cloud Network Automation” license applied to it. This is an easy thing to check. If your appliance has the “Cloud” tab, then the license is enabled. ...

Cisco UCS Director gives us some great automation and orchestration capabilities in the product. One thing I’ve noticed though is the need to customize the actions that can performed on virtual machines after deployment (Sometimes called Day 2 Operations). This post explains how to make some custom buttons for end users to manage their workloads more effectively. Create Workflow Creating a workflow is out of the scope of this post, but we need to have a workflow to use for our examples. I’ve created a very simple workflow to create a VM Snapshot and email the user when it happens. To create your own workflow Go to Policies –> Orchestration –> Workflows to get started. ...