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vRealize Orchestrator

vRealize Automation 8.5

A few days ago, VMware released an update for vRealize Automation (vRA). The list of improvements seems relatively minor this time, as detailed in the Release Notes. It seems the biggest change was mentioned in the blog announcement for this release, where vRA is moving to monthly releases. Since these updates are feature focused, that potentially means a more frequent update cycle for administrators. Hopefully this means the update process will become smoother going forward. From personal experience, it’s been a bit hit and miss.

vRealize Automation 8.4

VMware have released another update to vRealize Automation (vRA) 8. Like 8.3, I had issues updating to this version using Lifecycle Manager. This is why I never got around to writing about the 8.3 release. I ended up doing a fresh installation of 8.4 to see what’s new and changed.

What’s New

Going through the Release Notes, it seems that this release is a set of incremental changes. There is a change to how the Access Token for the API functions, which could have an impact on those who are leveraging the REST API. As per the notes, there’s also been a lot of improvements to accessibility. It’s good to see VMware pushing ahead with this sort of initiative.

Calling System Center Orchestrator Runbooks from vRealize Orchestrator

Sometimes you end up having to put in place an implementation that’s pretty crazy to get something (non-production) over the line. This was the case recently where I used vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) to call System Center Orchestrator (SCORCH) Runbooks. That is, using Orchestrator to call Orchestrator…

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A lot of the credit for figuring out how to do this goes to Laurie Rhodes and their blog post about calling SCORCH runbooks via REST using Powershell. It was my starting point for this piece of work and I was able to adapt the core pieces of this for my scenario.

vRO Configuration

Assuming there’s existing SCORCH and vRO instances, the first task is to add the SCORCH server as a REST host in vRO. This can be achieved by running the “Add a REST Host” workflow that comes with vRO. The “Orchestrator Web Service” runs on port 81, so that will affect the settings for the host.

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Managing Local Admins via vRealize Automation

One of the major benefits of vRealize Automation (vRA) is the ability to add and extend the “Actions” available. These Actions enable self-service by the customer. One scenario I wanted to try was allowing someone to manage local administrators on a virtual machine they had provisioned.

Creating The Workflow

The starting point with this is creating a Workflow in vRealize Orchestrator (vRO). Managing local administrators would mean being able to add and remove members, so if I wanted it as a single workflow, there would be some sort of branching logic, such as the flowchart below: Image