Just another automation manager

With vRA 8.5 follows an updated vRO plugin that gives more or less the same insight as in the previously vRO7 plugin. This feels weirdly nice for someone who enjoys spending time in vRO vRealize Automation 8.5 Release Notes

Event Broker enhancements Ability to add subscriptions at post provisioning stage and before power on. vRealize-Automation-84-releasenotes

To a lot of vRealize Automation 6-7 Managers moving to vRealize Automation 8 is a rather large adaptation of new skillsets. What we have currently been looking at is adapt the new Event Topic model. And there is a lot of Event Topics to follow, but I still feel something is missing. Full list of Event Topics documented @VMware Docs Compute allocation Yes Issued before the allocation of  resourcenames  and  hostselections . Both of these properties can be modified at this stage. Compute post provision Yes Issued after a resource was provisioned successfully. Compute post removal Yes issued after a compute resource was removed. Compute provision Yes Issued before the resource is provisioned at the hypervisor layer. Note: You can change the allocated IP address. Compute removal Yes Issued before the resource is removed. Compute reservation Yes Issued at the time of reservation. Note: You can change the placement order. Deployment action completed Yes Issued after a deploymen...

Some days ago as vRA 8.2 Patch 1 came along we decided to create a new test environment to see the upgrade process. It went rather smoothly as this is not the first environment to be deployed with vRSLCM. Few minutes of prepare vRSLCM and deployment went good, logging on to the new environment and then proceeded to install vRA 8.2 Patch 1.  https://docs.vmware.com/en/vRealize-Automation/8.2/rn/vRealize-Automation-82-releasenotes.html Now all went rather smoothly and we were please with the result. Sometime during the few last days also vIDM was patched to 3.3.3 https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Workspace-ONE-Access/3.3/rn/VMware-Identity-Manager-333-Release-Notes.html And all of a sudden we lost access to our little test environment. As it was only there to test the upgrade patch 1, it was not a large issue, but strange never the less. In this test environment, we did not set up any other access roles, besides the default config_admin user. We could log in with it, but we had no ac...

Many are using SSH to run commands something similar to  var  passwordAuthentication = false; var password = ''; var session = new SSHSession(hostName, username, port); session.connectWithPasswordOrIdentity(passwordAuthentication, password, path); Where the path leads to the private key file for the connection. Storing several key files in the vRO filesystem could easily lead to forget it when moving to a new vRO or add a new vRO node. Also when moving forward with vRO 8 it's less of a good idea to add elements to the local filesystem as a manual step. My suggestion for a solution is to make use of the vRO resource element. Store your key file as a vRO resource element, using the following step of code can runtime make the key available for SSHSession. var tempDirectory = System.getTempDirectory(); filePath =  tempDirectory + "/" + keyfile.name; keyfile.writeContentToFile( filePath ); Send the private key file as a resource to the action or workflow and you will h...

While assessing the migration to vRA8 most definitely you will run into deprecated entitled actions or extensions. A lot of the internal VMware Actions or Extensions are no longer valid, here is a small list of common ones: Connect using SSH Connect using VMRC Connect using RDP Execute Reconfigure Cancel Reconfigure Scale In Scale Out Power Cycle ... A dirty quick fix is to loop all your entitlements before running the migration assistant and remove all of these deprecated if you do not depend on anyone using them in your vRA7 environment. var entitlements = Server.findAllForType("vCACCAFE:Entitlement"); for each (var entitlement in entitlements) { System.log(entitlement.name); var updated = false; var host = vCACCAFEEntitiesFinder.getHostForEntity(entitlement); var client = host.createCatalogClient().getCatalogEntitlementService(); var entitledResourceOperations = entitlement.getEntitledResourceOperations(); for each (operation in entitledResourceOperations) { ...

Steps to get up and running with vRO 8. Depending on your previous usage of vRO 7 this might the step that requires the most work when you are migrating to vRA8. Attribute Parameter Contains vCAC/vCACCAFE type! cafeHost|vCACCAFE:VCACHost| Switch to vRealize Automation 8 Types Input Parameter Contains vCAC/vCACCAFE type! subtenant|vCACCAFE:Subtenant Switch to vRealize Automation 8 Types Input Parameter Contains Payload Properties! payload|Properties Ensure the selected properties are supported by vRealize Automation 8 The first two will be quite common for everyone who has automated vRA7 using the vRA Plugins for vCAC and vCACCAFE the only working rewrite here is to move to the REST API and redo the work directly. The last one is also heavily used by everyone who relies on the Subscriptions both by pick up information in vRO and sending information back to vRA with " virtualmachineAddorUpdateProperties ". With just about 190 workflows to redo/rewrite or so i gues...

Recently looked for an in vRO cache system and came across https://github.com/dimitrovvlado/o11n-plugin-cache This is quite handy if you need a place to temporarily store values, eighter while provisioning, or to avoid using the vRO Lock system. Could be a perfect spot for storing info while all your workflows execute and need access to a token: CacheManager.mapService.putForMap("tokenStore", 'my-access-token', token, 15, CacheTimeUnit.MINUTES); var my-access-token = CacheManager.mapService.getForMap("tokenStore", my-access-token'); Other use cases could be to make sure a sequence number is not reused or an FQDN is kept unique until machines have properly provisioned.

 Step 1 - Deploy vRA 8 If you start fresh use the Easy Installer and skip the rest of this post If you have vRA 7 hopefully you already have a vRSLCM and vIDM If not, use the Easy Installer and we meet again in a few steps. Deploy with vRSLCM is fairly straight forward and will take a few minutes of your time and a coffee break while deploying resources. Prepare an FQDN and associate an IP as the deployment will make sure it has a reverse lookup. You will need to create credentials in vRSLCM to go along with the deployment, tho this will mostly be used for accessing SHELL or vRO Configuration. Pull out your license key and prepare a certificate and in about 10 easy steps you will have your vRA8 up and running. Step 2 - Configuration vRA8 Login? vRA8 now relay on the external vIDM so go ahead and pull our the config_admin user credentials and login to System Domain . Now for everyone familiar with vRA7, you will feel a bit lost at first, tho you will quickly recognize and feel a bi...