Part of the wizard to setup vRA 7 includes a step towards the end to create a vRO workflow that will create initial content within a vRA Tenant. To run the workflow, login to the default vRA tenant as the configurationadmin account created as part of the initial setup:
There are various inputs required depending on such things as if you wish to use the default Tenant or create an additional one:
vRA 6.2.2: while attempting to deploy a VM from blueprint we received the following error:
Internal error: Error allocating network on machine. Attempted to divide by zero
Pretty helpful error message as usual for this version of the product ;-)
The Network Profile and Path appeared to be set correctly when requesting the VM. We eventually tracked it down to the Network Profile IP Range having run out of unallocated IPs.
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.
vRA Build 6.2.2-2754020
vRO 6.0.1
Via the vRA GUI I can create Business Groups with the same names in different Tenants as follows:
Tenant1: BusGroup1, BusGroup2, BusGroup3
Tenant2: BusGroup1, BusGroup2, BusGroup3
However, creating the Business Groups with the same names in different Tenants via the vRO plugin, specifically the workflow Library / vCloud Automation Center / Administration / Business Groups / Create a Business Group, fails in the second tenant with the below error:
If you have the mis good fortune to work with the vCloud / vRA Automation Center Designer, which can still be used / is required for some elements of automation within vCAC / vRA then you may experience issues even installing it.
While attempting to install the Designer client on two different management servers (Windows 2008 R2 and 2012 R2), I received the same error:
vCloud Automation Center Designer: Setup was Interrupted
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.
As of vRealize Automation version 6.2.1 there are a few different approaches to automating elements of the product itself, as opposed to using it for the automation tasks it is designed to help you with. This is along the lines of configuring elements within vRA, some of which I have covered previously within this blog post series. That series focused on using the vRA plugin for vRealize Orchestrator. However, the plugin doesn’t cover everything that you might need to automate within the product.