Since I’m preparing to write a short series of articles on my recent Home Lab purchases, I figured I should preface those articles with a little history on my current hardware… During the summer of 2011 around June/July, I wanted to have a home environment to install, configure, and test things - you know, the typical techie Hands-On environment. My requirements were as follows: Try to keep costs down Try for quiet equipment Minimize power consumption This article will describe the original purchase and progression of the lab.

This post is about my experience with the VMworld 2016 Barcelona Hackathon. Since I had never participated in such an event, I wasn’t sure about signing up. I hope that after reading this post, you consider signing up for any such Hackathon in the future, whether it is an internal event, VMUG gathering, VMworld, or any similar gathering of tech-geeks like me and many of the readers of this blog!

Two years ago, I wrote a similar article around vCAC’s embedded vCO but a lot has changed since then so those older steps no longer apply. This brief article will quickly walk you through the steps required to allow vRealize Automation 7.0/7.1/7.2’s embedded vRealize Orchestrator to allow Active Directory Domain accounts login to the vRO Client. Pre-Requisites This article assumes the following: vRealize Automation 7.0-7.2 is installed and configured (NOTE: This has not been tested with 7.

Each time vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) runs a workflow, a token (workflow execution) is added beneath the workflow in the vRO client. By default vRO will keep up to 100 of these tokens! This may be a slight annoyance to people who are only interested in the last 5-20 runs. This article will shed some light on the configuration options you have available to you. Tired of seeing too many workflow tokens?

Although vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) has provided API documentation built-in to the server, it was static content that could not be quickly used for tests or building queries. When a product provides a nice API explorer that not only tells you the available urls and basic docs, but also provides a web-based UI that allows you to quickly build up custom calls and shows you the generated content, the consumption and integration time for developers is reduced considerably.

Hello everyone! I've recently received news that there is some Errata update for the VMware vRealize Orchestrator Essentials book. The author has provided some updated material to reflect changes as a result of the GA of VMware vRealize Orchestrator 7.0. You can learn more about the updates here: http://langenhan.info/publications.html.

I am working on a project where I need to apply live, permanent networking configuration changes to Linux VMs that may not even have a network configured in the first place. To do so I am leveraging: vSphere guest operations allowing to run commands in the guest OS even if it is not networked yet. NetworkManager / nmcli which provides a command line way to get and set a broad set of network configurations that can be applied immediately and permanently .

vCenter 6 has introduced an important new feature for anyone interested in Automation and integration : a REST based endpoint providing access to some of the recent functionality such as the tagging service, the content library and transfer service : It is called “VMware vCloud Suite SDK” and codenamed vAPI. In addition to the REST API it provides language bindings for Java, Python, .NET, Perl and Ruby. If you want to know more about vAPI you can read the blog article I wrote on the VMware CTO Ambassadors blog.

VMware’s vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) is all about modular, reusable components. Many times you wish to call an existing workflow from your own custom workflow but don’t want to manually re-create all the different presentation settings. It’s not such a big task if there are only one or two workflows, but how about when there are 10+ ? Good news is that you don’t have to! This quick little video demonstrates how to Synchronize the Presentation of an embedded workflow to your own.

Recently I saw a pair of articles by @RoeyAzroel on vRO XML & JSON Gotcha! - Part 1 and Part 2. This reminded me that I had some sample code that I refer to when working with json as well so figured I would share here. Be sure you know about the JSON object and its .parse and .stringify methods since they do not appear anywhere in the Orchestrator’s API explorer or documentation.