Of late I have been working on a number of Cloud Templates that require quite an extensive set of custom properties to be set. These custom properties are used to enable further configuration to take place during the deployment process. Additionally, some contain computed values that are then...
I thought for a bit of a laugh I would challenge myself to create an ABX action to raise a Jira ticket when a deployment fails. In the end it wasn’t too difficult and it certainly shows that there could be some good further use cases for integration...
So, first day back to work in the new year and I immediately have a problem in my home lab with vRA8. Simply put, it isn’t behaving. With some investigation I discovered that /var/log was full (100% utilised space on the volume). What to do? What to do?!?...
Recently I have been helping a customer replace their self-signed Management Agent certificate in vRA7.6 with a new self-signed one (old one is expiring). To be clear this is the Management Agent certificate on the Iaas servers. VMware provide documentation on how to replace the certificate. But, to...
Something that I have had to do a lot of is working on subscription event based vRO workflows and ABX actions. The frustrating thing can be that you want to be able to develop in vRO using the vRA payload, without having to constantly ask vRA to create...
If you have reviewed some of my other posts here on automationpro.co.uk, you will know that I’m a fan of the ABX functionality in vRA8. Something that I have been wanting to accomplish for a while is sending an email from an ABX. There are some awesome posts...
Recently I needed to create a connection to a Windows server and perform some operations on it. From there I wanted to run commands on the Windows server itself, and I didn’t want to have to worry about double hop WinRM issues from PowerShell. I wanted something flexible...
Whilst working with a customer to provide extensibility through ABX actions, I came across a documented issue that I wasn’t previously aware of. Whilst testing an ABX action I received the following error message: abx-service [host=’abx-service-app-5c578445f7-j2w6m’ thread=’parallel-47′ user=” org=” trace=” component=’GatewayActionProvider’ method=’convertExceptions:437′ actionRunI d=’8a7480a179b68ffb0179e552568b1e1a’ context=’87aad62e-0d90-4a61-b265-8b3720239a00′ tokenId=’8eb4435a-be1f-4921-9ca3-d809625dce4c’ parentTokenId=’8bdaa86c-1a01-4714-8c8f-9b1d41a5d98f’] c.v.a.a.p.i.g.Gate...
I have been playing around with vra8 actions for a while now and whilst it is a handy function, I have found some issues with the PowerShell implementation. However, Python based actions seem to execute just fine. Whilst playing around I came across what looked like a really...
Recently I have been having some fun and games with vRA 8.2, in particular, with the extensibility capabilities. With the introduction of PowerShell support for vRA actions, I thought I would have a little play and see what I could break. I’m On A MetaData Hunt.. Ok, so...
Of late I have been playing with Terraform and the vRA 8 provider. Although I have found quite a few bugs with the provider (I’ll log those soon) it certainly is a great start! I have captured a quick demo below where I configure settings on a brand...
Attached to this post you will find a JSON file that can be imported into Postman. The import will give you a collection called ‘AutomationPro-vRA8’ which contains 19 example requests for using against a VMware vRA 8 install. Although there are many more requests that can be made,...
Since the announcement of VMware vRealize 8, migration has been a popular topic. I don’t mean deployment of vRA8 itself; that is handled [editor: very nicely I might add] by the new version of VMware Lifecycle Manager. Follow the wizard and sooner rather than later you will have...
VMware vRealize Automation 8 is a leap forwards and certainly a far cry from what we all knew as vRealize Automation 7.x. A new code base with a new look, if you have any familiarity with VMware vRealize Automation Cloud (formerly Cloud Automation Services) software as a service...
I got caught out last week by something that I had not come across before. A customer has an environment comprised of vSphere, vRA, vRO.. the usual suspects. vRA and vRO and associated IAAS roles were all duplicated and sat behind a load balancer. Anyway, whilst re-writing some...