vro - Jesse Boyce

Calling System Center Orchestrator Runbooks from vRealize Orchestrator

13/12/2019 by user

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…

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.

VMware vRealize Automation 7.6 – What’s New

26/04/2019 by user

VMware released an update for vRealize Automation (vRA) at the start of this month. This was a slight increment from 7.5 to 7.6. At a high level, two key areas of change are NSX integration and the vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) user experience. The Release Notes goes into a bit more detail and I’ll be using those more detailed items as a guide for the content in this post. I will be skipping over the new NSX pieces as I don’t have those available to me.

vRealize Orchestrator – PowerShell Hosts

02/01/2019 by user

PowerShell Hosts are one of the types of endpoint available in vRealize Orchestrator’s Inventory. By having a PowerShell Host, you can leverage the breadth of PowerShell functionality from within your vRealize Orchestrator workflows. In this article, I’ll run through adding a PowerShell Host as well as some considerations from a technical and security point of view.

Adding A PowerShell Host

vRealize Orchestrator has a built-in Workflow for adding a Host under Library > PowerShell > Configuration. Run the “Add a PowerShell host” Workflow to start it. The opening interface is below:

First page of the “Add a PowerShell Host” workflow

Creating Service Accounts with vRealize Orchestrator

11/12/2018 by user

vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) has a lot of plugins that allow it to integrate with other systems and services. One of such plugin is for Active Directory. This plugin allows you to perform a number of standard AD activities, like creating users. vRO already has built in workflows to create and manipulate users. In this post, I’m going to run through what you might end up implementing if you wanted to be able to create Service Accounts via vRO.