vRealize Orchestrator

When deploying machines from vRealize Automation version 8.x custom properties can be used to store values that you want to process yourself during the lifecycle of the machine. These custom properties can be accessed and updated with a vRealize Orchestrator workflow when called by a subscription. How to read and update custom properties is documented in this article. In the video below I show how the properties are read and updated. Also a new custom property is added during execution.

An updated version of this article can be found here: http://www.anjabastiaansen.nl/moid

vRealize Orchestrator allows you to configure permissions for users in your authentication domain to access your vRO deployment with different types of access. While you might want administrators to access your workflows from the vSphere Web Client sometimes there will still be users that need access with the vRO client. One example is a group of developers that you only want to allow access to one or just a few folders in your vRO environment.

With vRealize Automation 7 an Approval Policy can be linked to an event subscription that in turn can trigger a vRealize Orchestator workflow to perform an external approval process. In this article I describe how to setup the Workflow, the Approval Policy and the Event Subscription.

Workflow as downloadable package

This simple workflow can be used to demonstrate the failover behavior in case of a vRealize Orchestrator node failure. It creates the number of VMs that your specify. I suggest 30. During the execution of the workflow power off one node of the cluster and you will be able to demonstrate that the execution continues on another node.

The workflow is available as a downloadable package:

com.vmwarebits.clustertest.zip

This example workflow shows how you can use a ResourceElement containing a list of virtual machine names and execute a workflow for each of the VMs in the list. The workflows and actions are available as a package here: com.vmwarebits.vmlistExample.zip.

To use the workflow yoi create a ResourceElement and import a text file that contains the virtual machine names, such as in the next image.

This workflow allows you to change the machine name for a vRealize Automation Virtual Machine during the build process. It is based on the articles series on the VMware Blog created by Ted Sprinks. (link) That series of three articles is very good, but it might be a bit lengthy if you just need this one single workflow.

When you have the ID of a workflow then how do you find out what the name of the workflow is and where it's located. To simplify this search I have created this workflow.

You can download the workflow here.

This is the code of the scripting element that is used for the search: