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.

When working with vRealize Orchestrator and Active Directory it has been possible for a long time to use the built in Active Directory plugin for many tasks. One of the drawbacks with the various iterations of the 1.0.x version of the plugin however, was the lack of support for multiple domains and multiple domain controllers. This was naturally quite restrictive in environments with more than a single domain which is pretty common for many reasons since as distributed management, mergers & takeovers and poor planning ;-)

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’;

After setting up a fresh deployment of the vRO 5.5.2.1 appliance and configuring it to use an external SQL database I noticed that many of the default plugins appeared to be missing in the Workflow library folder: (there should be a lot more than listed here) Logging into the vRO configuration page showed the below list of plugins (and more going off the screen) appeared to exist and be installed correctly.

Over the last few years I have built up a number of functions to use alongside the out of the box functionality in PowerCLI. I’ve posted some of the content before on this blog, but have at last got round to publishing all of the content that I am able to share, in a module available on GitHub - I’ve named it the PowerCLITools Community Module in the hope that some others might want to contribute content to it or improve what I have already put together.

There aren’t many occasions when you trip up in PowerShell because of something being case sensitive, it generally doesn’t happen since most things are typically not like that. I was working with the PowerCLI cmdlet Get-Task and in particular the ID parameter to do something like: Get-Task -Id 'task-task-2035' I had originally found the ID via: Get-Task | Format-Table Name,ID -AutoSize However, I received the error that no tasks of that ID were found :

We’ve been waiting for this a long time, but with the 6.0 release PowerCLI is now available as a module. Microsoft changed the way itself and third-parties should deliver PowerShell functionality back in PowerShell version 2 by offering modules. Previously in PowerShell version 1 additional functionality was available via snap-ins. It’s not fully there yet, but some of the functionality is now available in a module. 6.0 will be a hybrid release, with the rest to follow later.

While working with Nested ESXi in my lab, I had an issue where I could communicate with the IP address on vmk0, but after adding multiple additional VMkernel Ports could not communicate with any of the additional IP addresses. It’s a simple network for testing, everything on the same subnet and no VLANs involved. I hadn’t done too much reading on the subject before, other than knowing I needed to implement Promiscuous Mode for the Port Group on the physical ESXi servers.

The first London VMUG of 2015 is almost upon us and as usual looks like a great line up of activities. My employer Xtravirt is sponsoring the labs and have a tech-preview of some software that you may be interested to check out. Plus one of my colleagues Michael Poore will be talking about a real world automation project. Make sure you register and get along to the event. [table id=2 /]