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.
When using the Advanced Service Designer to create Resource Actions it’s possible you may hit the following issue in vCAC 6.0.x if you attempt to access the Input Resource as part of the workflow Presentation. While everything will appear to work correctly in vCO, when the form is accessed by a vCAC user the Input Resource may not (I say *may* because the behaviour is inconsistent, sometimes it works, sometimes not!
Dynamic Types in vCAC enable you to extend the vCAC Inventory to include types created in vCO. For example you might be working with an F5 system and wish to make a tangible object back in vCAC that a user can view the properties of and have Actions assigned to.
Having created some Dynaimc Types in vCO for a project I was working on they were not appearing as available to add in vCAC Custom Resources - only the defaults were seen to be available.
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 7 we look at publishing our Create-Tenant vCO workflow back into vCAC as a catalog item to make for easy consumption of it.
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