When a file is imported into vRO to be used as a Resource Element, a MIME type is automatically set depending on what has been imported. For instance, in the below example a shell script has been imported, the contents of which will be used as part of some vRO automation - notice the MIME type has been set to application/x-sh.
This doesn’t really cause a problem in itself when using the Resource Element in a workflow, however vRO doesn’t display the content of all MIME types when looking at the file in the Viewer tab and may display the message “cannot display this kind of element” instead - *.
A significant pain point on a recent project of mine was automating the creation of blueprints in vRA 6.2 with vRO. There was very little information around on how this could be achieved and even with the method that we eventually came up with still required some manual effort and was not always the most reliable.
Enter vRA 7 and some hope that things may have gotten better.
First of all I looked through the vRA 7 Programming Guide and found some examples on exporting content from vRA 7.
The original Project Onyx (also here) was a VMware Fling which intercepted calls between the C# vSphere client and vCenter and could translate things you did in the GUI client to code in your choice of languages; SOAP, C#, PowerCLI, and JavaScript. This was really useful if say a thing you needed to do was not yet covered by a PowerCLI cmdlet, or you wanted to try and make it faster by using Get-View, or you didn’t know how to code it in JavaScript for vRO.
There is an excellent post over at Automate-IT.today which details how to create a vRA IaaS Blueprint from vRO. Once you have used the workflow from that site to create a Blueprint it still needs to be published before it can be used as a vRA Catalog Item, added to a Service etc.
Note that even updating Christiaan Roeleveld’s code to set the property IsPublished to true, doesn’t actually publish the Blueprint.
After creating a Blueprint in vRA it is necessary to publish the Blueprint into the Catalog so that it can be consumed by the appropriate set of users. This creates a link between the two different items since the Catalog Item is part of the vRA appliance and the Blueprint can be found in the Windows appliance.
Here’s the Blueprint details from the Inventory tab of vRO, with the virtualMachineTemplateID, a.
While working in vRealize Orchestrator with an external SOAP based system I was having issues with line breaks being removed from text sent across as part of a reasonably large SOAP request containing multiple items.
Say we have the following text strings and want to pass them into the SOAP request with line breaks in-between each one:
[code language=“javascript”]
text1 = ‘This is text1’; text2 = ‘This is text2’; text3 = ‘This is text3’;
Requirement:
Present a vCO / vRO form which contains two password entry fields using SecureStrings and a field which displays whether the two entered passwords match.
Using an if statement to test whether two SecureStrings are equal will fail even if the text entered is identical. As mentioned in this communities post, in a workflow it is possible to take the SecureStrings into a scriptable task and output them as Strings.
In this series we will see how to automate the creation of a tenant in vCAC using vCO. There are multiple tasks to provision a tenant in vCAC, so even though it is an automation product itself, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t look at automating parts of it too.
In part 6 we look at adding Administrators to a Tenant in vCAC.
1) Add the ‘Add administrators’ workflow
Drag the Add administrators workflow from the vCloud Automation Center section of the workflow library
In this series we will see how to automate the creation of a tenant in vCAC using vCO. There are multiple tasks to provision a tenant in vCAC, so even though it is an automation product itself, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t look at automating parts of it too.
In part 5 we look at adding an Identity Store to a Tenant in vCAC.
1) Generate the variables for adding an Identity Store
In this series we will see how to automate the creation of a tenant in vCAC using vCO. There are multiple tasks to provision a tenant in vCAC, so even though it is an automation product itself, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t look at automating parts of it too. In part 3 we look at installing the vCAC plugin for vCO
Navigate to the Configuration webpage, in my case https://localhost:8283/