Just another automation manager

  vRA 7.6 Patch 19 https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/70911 Easy installer

Recently started automating Microsoft DNS and the best way in seems to be through Powershell . One of the common ways to deal with this is through a Powershell Host defined in vRO. You set it up securely with HTTPS and Kerberos and specify the credentials of a user with DNS server rights enough to see and manipulate the content of the zones and records you want to automate. So far so good, and you start developing the PowerShell commands you might need. Resolve-DnsName (Get-ADDomain).DNSroot -type ns | ? {$_.type -eq "A"} | select name,Address,IP4Address,IPAddress | ConvertTo-Json -depth 1 -Compress Get-DnsServerZone -ComputerName (Get-ADDomain).DNSroot Get-DnsServerResourceRecord -ComputerName (Get-ADDomain).DNSroot And they all work out nicely when you run them from your Powershell host, but once you run them from vRO in the Powershell session you run into the double-hop auth problem . There are many ways to deal with this, but often you need to thinker both with the Powers...

As it seems every week now VMware releases a hotfix for vRA7.6 https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/70911 Installing these usually go rather smoothly, but today we ran into a smaller issue. Installation got stuck at rpm -Uvh --replacepkgs /usr/lib/vcac/patches/repo/cafe/patchRpms/*.rpm We tried to manually update the packages and found there was a transaction lock warning: waiting for transaction lock on /var/lib/rpm/__db.000 This can be fixed by rebuilding the RPM database. rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db.00* rpm --rebuilddb Now we were more or less ready to revert to snapshots and restart the whole process when I noticed there is actually a retry option, previously when patches failed we had to restart the whole process.  Cheers VMware that was useful 

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...

How many tasks did you perhaps think, this should be automated! ? Perhaps it is a pretty simple task like: Assign a tag to a newly deployed host Set a custom property on a new VM Add a Host or VM to a CMDB (VMs perhaps already handled by vRealize Automation) Or a slightly more advanced task Zone in a Host to the FC fabric, for datastore visibility Add a newly created Cluster to vRA Fabric or Cloud Zone Discover and set capability tags based on HW (GPU or similar) Acquire Licenses or register in 3rd party license tools like Red Hat Satellite Download and deploy VMware's Event Broker Appliance  https://flings.vmware.com/vmware-event-broker-appliance https://vmweventbroker.io/

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) { ...