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.
My colleague, Chris Slater at defined by software has published an article on how to extend VMware Automation Center (vCAC) with F5 firewall functionality. I usually do not cross post articles but this one is worth mentioning since it is a real world example on how to leverage vCAC + vCO + Dynamic Types + third party API.
The first part of the article explains the different options available to automate F5 including the F5 plug-in for vCO, PowerShell, the big IP CLI, the SOAP and REST APIs and give an overview of the solution.
Last year I have created an extensibility package to simplify and automate the steps necessary to extend the vCAC IaaS lifecycle process with calling out vCO workflows. While this was mainly aimed at accelerating Proof of Concepts it has been since then broadly adopted in production environments. Since vCAC 6.0 it is part of the product and available for vCAC 5.2 as a separate download.
Since this is now becoming a very hot topic I am including here a very useful extensibility introduction video that was released by my colleagues from tech marketing almost three months ago.
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.
If you’re reading this article, it may be because you have installed vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) and are interested in using an account other than administrator@vsphere.local to login to the embedded vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) server. By default, the vCO Server uses a “vcoadmins” group in the “vsphere.local” domain provided by the SSO server that vCAC was configured to use. This short tutorial will step you through a pretty basic configuration where I have just deployed a vCAC 6.
vCloud Automation Center is the VMware hybrid cloud self-service provisioning portal. It can be customized to extend its OOTB functionality. The following tutorial shows how from the vSphere web client create a menu operation to run a program in a guest or how to do it automatically once the VM has been provisioned. This does not involve any scripting !
Prerequisites vCenter Orchestrator configured with:
vCenter plug-in (with the same host used in vCAC) vCAC plug-in 5.
vCloud Automation Center has several constructs such as blueprints, business groups, reservations to manage the virtual machines lifecycle and governance policies.
While most customers will use vCloud Automation Center out of the box some have several use cases for automation and integration. This is where vCenter Orchestrator comes into the picture.
The vCloud Automation Center Infrastructure as a service data model (vCAC IaaS) vCAC IaaS has an extensible model consisting of different metamodels.
