In previous tutorials we created inventory object types, their children objects, workflows to operate these that we packaged for our end users.
In this tutorial we are going to create an orchestrator plug-in to list vCO / vRO workflows ! You may wonder why doing so ?
This is a good use case for leveraging some of the more advanced features of the plug-in generator v2 to handle complex REST APIs and improving performance when needed.
In part 1 and part 2 we created the inventory objects, in part 3 we created methods for this objects and ran a generic workflow to run these methods.
In this article we will create workflows for calling these methods, include them in a package with all the plug-in configuration to ship it to our end users.
Creating the workflows The invoke workflows in the plug-in facilitate running REST operations. End users and or external system will expect simpler workflows.
Part 1 of the plug-in generator v2 series covered how to create new plug-in inventory types, part 2 how to create their child object types. This part will focus on how to define object methods and associated workflows. Having Orchestrator inventory types is a necessity to use with vRealize Automation (formerly vCAC) Advanced Service Designer. Once you have these inventory objects you may wonder how to use these in workflows. This is what this article covers.
In the part 1 I walk through step by step to create a plug-in object type leveraging the Plug-in Generator version 2.
In this article I will demonstrate one of the new feature of this version 2 : Create a child object type.
Having the plug-in inventory organized in a tree view allows to represent most of the objects hierarchies found in applications APIs.
Resuming from part 1 I need to create a vNIC object.
In a previous article I have explained how Dynamic Types work and how these are very useful to create a vCO / vRO plugin that will enable the XaaS capabilitites of vCAC / vRA.
Then explained how to build your own twitter plug-in using the plug-in generator package. I have now extended the capabilities of the plug-in generator and will attempt to demonstrate these in this new series of articles. This article use NSX as the orchestrated endpoint but following the explanation included on this tutorial you should be able to get it to work with many REST web service.
Welcome back! This is the third article of a multi-part series that steps you through the process of exposing our workflows from the last article to vRealize Automation’s (vRA) Advanced Service Designer (ASD).
Introduction This third article will cover the following topics:
How to add the simple CMDB to vRealize Automation’s Advanced Service Designer Add a Day 2 operation to delete an Asset from our table Future article will cover the following topic:
Welcome back! This is the second article of a multi-part series that steps you through the process of mapping a SQL table into vRealize Orchestrator, building out a DynamicTypes plug-in inventory based on that table, then exposing it to vRealize Automation’s Advanced Service Designer (ASD). In the first article, we got our database table mapped using the SQL Plug-in and generated some CRUD workflows.
Introduction Let’s build a simple Dynamic Types plug-in around our SQL Table that we created in our previous article.
This multi-part series will step you through the process of mapping a Microsoft SQL Server table into vRealize Orchestrator, building out a DynamicTypes plug-in inventory based on that table (using my workflow package), then exposing it to vRealize Automation’s Advanced Service Designer (ASD).
Introduction vRealize Automation (vRA) features an Advanced Service Designer (ASD) that allows for you to offer nearly anything as a service (XaaS). In order to take advantage of that feature, it requires a vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) Inventory object.
In a previous article I have explained how the vCO dynamic Types allow to simplify the development of vCO plug-ins and how these are leveraged by VMware vCloud Automation Center XaaS. It is now time to experiment with creating a plugin with leveraging the Dynamic Types plug-in generator package.
Warning: You can do it without Java development experience and without having to write a single line of scripting !
As a first step download the Dynamic Types plug-in generator package from VMware communities.
You may have noticed that the vCO 5.5.1 release notes are listing a new feature called “Dynamic Types”
“Workflow developers are now able to explore the new Dynamic Types which currently is being shipped with Beta quality. They can easily extend vCenter Orchestrator plug-ins by adding their custom types accessible from the scripting API. New types become available in the inventory right after creation and they could be directly leveraged from the vCAC ASD context as part of the cloud provisioning process and XaaS definition.
