Create Blueprints in vRA7 with PowervRA

Update 29/09/2016:

The API documentation for importing a vRA Content Package contains a warning:

At this point, we don’t support any form of rollback strategies. A failed import may potentially leave the system in an inconsistent state. Hence, its highly recommend to run a precheck/dry-run before the import to validate the package. See HTTP POST /api/packages/validate for more details. This will help catch most of the errors upfront.

Consequently, in release 1.3.1 we have added a new function Test-vRAContentPackage and included it by default in Import-vRAContentPackage. This should mitigate any issues with Importing a badly crafted Content Package, but you should of course test this before using in Production……

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A while back I wrote a post “Create Blueprints in vRA 7 via REST and via vRO” , with some details around automating vRA 7 Blueprint creation. Since that time Craig and I have published PowervRA, but in the initial releases I had some difficulty with providing the same functionality for PowerShell as I had in the previous post with REST and vRO.

However, thanks to some Ninja skills from Craig in our other project PowervRO, I was able to take the work we did over there around importing vRO Packages / Workflows etc via PowerShell and re-use it in PowervRA for a new function Import-vRAContentPackage, which is available in the latest release of PowervRA 1.3.0. Previous releases contained: New, Get, Remove and Export-vRAContentPackage, we just did not have the last piece of the puzzle: Import.

Example:

So here’s an example of how it works. In the previous article I showed how vRA Blueprints are bundled up into Content Packages and then exported to a zip file containing YAML files which each describe the Blueprints. We need to do the same when automating this process with PowerShell and PowervRA, so first of all we need to know the IDs of any Blueprints to add to the Content Package:

Now we create a Content Package containing the Id of the centos Blueprint that we wish to export:

and then export that Content Package to a zip file:

Take a look at the contents of the zip file and you will see that it contains a metadata.yaml file and a yaml file per Blueprint in a folder composite-blueprint:

Take a look at the contents of the centos.yaml file to see how a Blueprint is described:

Now we can either modify that file and import back into the same system if we want to change the existing Blueprint or we can take it further if we want to create more Blueprints. Let’s say we want to add a second, similar Blueprint. All we need to do is copy the existing centos.yaml file, make changes in it (I’ve just given larger CPU and memory values), then update the metadata.yaml file to reference the extra file. So they would end up like this:

centosb.yaml:

metadata.yaml:

Now create a new zip file containing the updated metadata.yaml file and the two blueprint yaml files: