What’s in my vRA7 EBS Payloads?

Written by Sam McGeown
Published on 30/3/2016 - Read in about 2 min (290 words)

<img class=“alignright size-thumbnail wp-image-6186” src="/images/2015/07/vRA-Product-Icon-Mac_0.png" alt=“vRA” width=“150” height=“150” - a properties object.

I wanted to create a workflow that I could enable to log all of the keys, values and types of the properties object for each stage of the vRA7 MachineProvisioning workflows, and create a reference for myself on the payload for each stage.

To do this I created a new workflow “debugProperties” and added an input variable called “payload”, type Properties. Next I added a single scriptable task and cycled through the properties. Some of the properties’ values are actually other properties objects, so there’s a function to test the type and iterate through if required.

You can download the debugProperties workflow here.

To make it work, you will need to tell your blueprint to pass the payloads to Orchestrator using the following properties:

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I also added a custom property of my own, to watch it go through the events.

I then added a subscription to the MachineProvisioning Events, using the following conditions to ensure it only ran on the Blueprint with “DEBUG” in the name (each machine build generates a lot of events, so we don’t want every build to run every event!)

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As you can see - even for one run there are a lot of events triggered - this is just a standard VM build, and then expire.

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The output of these workflows looks like this:

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Finally, for my own reference I wanted to view my example data in an easier format - so I have created a spreadsheet and pulled in the relevant data, collating it by workflow stage. The spreadsheet is also available on my vRA7 EBS Examples github page

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Not the worlds most exciting vRA7 post - but hopefully a useful reference!

 

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