VREALIZE ORCHESTRATOR

This series was originally going to be a more polished endeavour, but unfortunately time got in the way. A prod from James Kilby (@jameskilbynet) has convinced me to publish as is, as a series of lab notes. Maybe one day I’ll loop back and finish them…
Requirements Routing Because I’m backing my vCloud Director installation with NSX-T, I will be using my existing Tier-0 router, which interfaces with my physical router via BGP.

Published under Automation, Career, Certification, Community, VMware, vRealize Automation and vRealize Orchestrator




This series was originally going to be a more polished endeavour, but unfortunately time got in the way. A prod from James Kilby (@jameskilbynet) has convinced me to publish as is, as a series of lab notes. Maybe one day I’ll loop back and finish them…
Prerequisites PostgreSQL server deployed and configured
Two vRO 7.4 appliances deployed
Before powering them on, add an additional network card on the vcd-sql network

Published under vRealize Operations and vRealize Orchestrator


I already have a vRealize Orchestrator workflow to shutdown my workload cluster. What I want to do is trigger that by a voice command from Alexa.
Now, the correct and proper thing to do here would be to create a new Alexa skill, write the function in Lambda and connect that to my Orchestrator REST API and execute the workflow. That way I could control the “intents” and “utterances” and have verbal feedback.

In this humble consultant’s opinion, Log Insight is one of the most useful tools in the administrator’s tool belt for troubleshooting vRealize Automation. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve been asked to help troubleshoot an issue that, when asked, people don’t know which log they should be looking at. The simple fact is that vRealize Automation has a lot of log files. Correlating these log sources to provide an overall picture is a painful, manual process - unless you have Log Insight!

My vSphere lab is split into two halves - a low power management cluster, powered by 3 Intel NUCs, and a more hefty workload cluster powered by a Dell C6100 chassis with 3 nodes. The workload servers are noisy and power hungry so they tend to be powered off when I am not using them, and since they live in my garage, I power them on and off remotely.
To automate the process, I wanted to write an Orchestrator workflow (vRO sits on my management cluster and is therefore always on) that could safely and robustly shut down the workload cluster.

Published under VMware and vRealize Orchestrator


Big thanks to Jose Luis Gomez for this solution, his response to my tweet was spot on and invaluable!
I’ve been trying to configure vCloud Air as a vCloud Director host in vRealize Orchestrator in order to create some custom resource actions for Day 2 operations in vRealize Automation. What I found was that there’s *very* little information out there on how to do this, and I ended up writing my own custom resource mapping for the virtual machines to VCAC:VirtualMachine objects - at least that way I could add my resource action.