DefinIT

Alexa, turn on my workload cluster

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Like many other geeks out there, I received an Amazon Echo device this Christmas, and whether it’s a fad or not, I’ve spent a few happy hours setting up my Hue lights and some other automation. The room in the house with the most automation is my office – the novelty may wear off, but walking in each morning and saying “Alexa, turn on my office” and having everything wake up for me is really cool.

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. [Read more…]

vRealize Orchestrator Workflow: shutdownVSANCluster

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vRealize OrchestratorMy 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. There were some design considerations:

  • Something to do with the C6100 IPMI implementation and the ESXi driver does not like being woken from standby mode. It’s annoying, but not the end of the world – I can use impitool to power the hosts on from shutdown. If you want to use host standby, there’s a hostStandby and hostExitStandby workflow in the package on github.
  • I run VSAN on the cluster, so I need to enter maintenance mode without evacuating the data (which would take a long time and be pointless).
  • All the running VMs on the cluster should be shut down before the hosts attempt to go into maintenance mode.
  • I want a “what if” option, to see what the workflow would do if I ran it, without actually executing the shutdown – it’s largely for development purposes, but the power down/power on cycle takes a good half hour and I don’t want to waste time on a typo!

[Read more…]

#vROps Webinar Series 2016 – Part 10 – A Deep Dive into vROps API

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Time to publish the recording for the 10th episode of vROps Webinar Series. This time around we spoke about vRealize Operations Manager Resful API and how to use it. Post 20 minutes of slide-ware, I jumped into the lab and thanks to the demo god, we demonstrated a number of use cases and browsed through the documentation to make it easier for you to consume and use the same.

Big thanks to @sunny_dua for doing the session while I was MIA you are a legend buddy!

So without further ado, here is the recording for this session:

Deploying F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition (VE) in AWS

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Amazon Web Services AWS LogoRecently I was asked to develop some vRealize Orchestrator workflows against the F5 BIG-IP iControl REST API, but I was not able to test freely against a production appliance. After a lot of attempts to get in contact with F5 for a 90-day trial of the full version, or to purchase a lab license, I came up empty handed. The free version you can download from F5’s website is version 11.3, which does not feature the iControl REST API, which was released in 11.4.

What I did notice while on the F5 site was the links to the AWS Marketplace where you can rent F5 BIG-IP Virtual Editions by the hour – $0.83/hr + AWS usage fees.
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If you happen to have a license for BIG-IP there’s also a Bring Your Own License version, which would be handy. You can view all the options on F5 Network’s AWS Marketplace page.

Here’s how you set up your F5-in-AWS! [Read more…]

Adding a vCloud Air (PAYG/Gen2) instance to vRealize Orchestrator as a vCloud Director host

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vRABig 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. But this still didn’t expose the vCloud Director functionality for those machines. To do this I needed vCloud Air added as a vCloud Director host.

As per Jose’s advice, I duplicated the “com.vmware.library.vCloud.Host/addHost” action, named it “addHost_vCA_G2”:

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I then modified the following line to include “/api/compute”:

newHost.url = "https://" + host + ":" + port;

Becomes

newHost.url = "https://" + host + ":" + port + "/api/compute";

I then duplicated the “Add a connection” workflow to create “Add a connection (vCloud Air Gen2)” and swapped the old action for the new action:

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Now I can add vCloud Air (PAYG/Gen2) as an endpoint in the normal way:

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The out-of-the-box “IaaS vCD VM” Resource Mapping now works in vRA and I can create custom Resource Actions against the vCloud:VM object type.

Once again, big thanks to Jose for this solution!