vRO Composite Types

21/12/201831/12/2018 ~ Brian Gerrard

I have used vRO for quite some time, yet I have never really had a need to use Composite Types – until recently! This vRO feature is pretty cool and allows you to create arrays which can be polled by a Workflow and what is really a benefit for me is that allow you to minimise the amount of WFs needed or even the amount of input parameters into a Workflow.

I am a real advocate of using configuration files in vRO, and as anyone who attended my Glasgow VMUG session will (hopefully) remember that these are used for global settings which mean we don’t need to update individual Workflows if we point to these central configuration files. So where do Composite Types fit in here? Well recently I had a requirement around DNS information which had potential to impact manageability of Network Profiles in vRA. The requirement was around how DNS information would be added to a VM during deployment depending on things like location or operating system. Using vRA out the box IPAM meant that in order to achieve this I would have to create many profiles just to map different DNS info and then resolve complexity of splitting the IP ranges within the Profiles. An alternative way to meet this requirement along with making it easy to manage and fulfill any need to grow as more sites where added was composite types!

Lets have a look at how its done:

Continue reading →

Setting an SRM VM Priority from vRO

27/06/2018 ~ Brian Gerrard ~ 2 Comments

Recently I was given a requirement to enhance a vRO workflow which added a VM to disaster Recovery policy in SRM. The existing workflow by default added all VMs added to Priority 3 (normal) start up order. My requirement was to allow the user to specify the start up order.

Having a quick look at the environment, I could see that the SRM plugin was used so felt this was a good start – however it soon became apparent that it wasn’t ideal for me given that the information we can get out of the plugin is limited never mind having to manipulate that data. Looking online , it seemed that using PowerShell was the common answer to automating this, but I also had a constraint of not introducing any new plugins. During my online hunt I found the SRM 6.5 API guide and this became a nice resource. By browsing this API guide it became apparent that SOAP API was my only option and I continued to refer to this guide in order to find a solution – https://www.vmware.com/support/developer/srm-api/site-recovery-manager-65-api.pdf.

I decided to write this blog because there seemed a sever lack of info on using SOAP for SRM. Continue reading →

vBrownbag

08/01/201808/05/2018 ~ Brian Gerrard

Recently I had the pleasure of presenting on vBrownbag with my colleague Konrad Clapa. Konrad is a double VCDX in DCV and CMA and I am very proud that we where able to speak about our vRO and vRA best practices. We have worked together for around 3 years now developing and architecting the Service Catalog for Atos DDC and DPC products. See our session below and get in touch with any questions ……

Creating a vRO 7.3 Cluster

27/10/2017 ~ Brian Gerrard

Recently, we decided to test vRO 7.3 in clustered mode. In previous versions we have not had a great experience with vRO clusters and as a result have always had single vROs in Master and Slave setup. With the latest version seemingly giving more stability we have created a POC and Load Balanced as much as possible. I noticed a lack of blog posts about setting this up and decided to add one here.

At this stage I am assuming some pre-requisites met and design decisions have been made:

Load Balancers and DNS names have been setup for vRA and vRO
vRA has been configured and will be used as vRO authentication mode
SQL will be used as the Database for the cluster
vRO appliances have been deployed and powered on

Set Up Initial vRO Instance

Logon to the fist of our 2 vRO appliances using the control center URL – https://hostnameoffvro001.domain.local:8283/vco-controlcenter