<img class=“alignright size-thumbnail wp-image-7206” src="/images/2016/03/aaf-logo.png" alt=“aaf-logo” width=“150” height=“150” gems deep inside, vROps in this case is not without exception.

The Automation Action Framework (AAF) is one of these, a really powerful vROps in-built automation tool.

Now when I have discussed this capability with my peers and friends many ask why not use vRO etc? My reply is quite simple, “what if you do not have vRO or the in house skills to utilise it properly?” also “With the AAF you do -not- need any scripting knowledge or have to setup any workflows.”

<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.

Session Details:-

Capacity Planning Demystified!

Capacity Planning is an integral part of vRealize Operations Manager and through this session we want to de-mystify the concepts of Capacity Planning in vROps using features such as projects and the out-of-box capacity views. We look at defining the capacity planning policies based on the business requirements of an organization

A big thank you to Rawlinson Rivera to provide all the lab equipment required for the live and thanks again to my Co-host Sunny you’re a legend!

VMware KB2140539 where requesting an XaaS (vRealize Orchestrator) blueprint fails with:

Failed to retrieve form from provider

The KB describes it occuring when “more than one VMware vRealize Orchestrator instance is configured for different tenants”. The issue I faced is not the same - in my case, I had the system default tenant configured to use the embedded vRO, and the customer tenant configured to use the system default (which would be the embedded vRO!)

Capacity Planning Demystified!**

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Given the flexibility in which you can choose to use and deploy vROps a question that frequently comes out is “is there a best practice?”

While that phrase is getting pretty tired it is still valid if you are just starting a design for a new vROps build or trying to make the best of a bad implementation. Rather than me trying to tell you how you should use vROps in your place of work I would direct you to a very useful PDF VMware have produced vRealize Operations Manager Reference Architecture .

The new Event Broker service in vRA7 is one of the most exciting features of this latest release, the possibilities for extensibility are huge. At this point it time you can still use the old method of using workflow stubs to customise machine lifecycle events, but at some point in the future this will be deprecated and the Event Broker will be the only way to extend.

Those of you used to using vSphere on a regular basis will already be aware of the hardening guide for ESXi and vSphere but what about vROps?

If the vROps appliance needs to be hardened there is already a VMware provided guide and tool to accommodate.

Secure configuration guide - http://pubs.vmware.com/vrealizeoperationsmanager-61/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vrealize-operations-manager-61-secure-configuration-guide.pdf

“The documentation for Secure Configuration is intended to serve as a secure baseline for the deployment of vRealize Operations Manager.”

year long commitment of providing quality content on vRealize Operations Manager.

Please remember that this is an introductory session to policies and we intend to go deeper into policies in the next session in the month of March, where we deep dive into more details around capacity planning with vRealize Operations Manager. You will hear more about that as we progress into the next month.

Just a quick little post this morning! Anyone who works with the vRealize Automation APIs should definitely check out Grant Orchard and Roman Tarnavski’s awesome little side project, Platypus .

It only took me a couple of minutes to get it running on my MacBook - here’s how!

Download and install AppCatalyst

Open a new terminal window

Create a new VM called “photon"