[Quick Hint] Input parameters in vRealize Orchestrator 8 payload

Input paraments are available in vRO8 payload only in very early stages of deployment. For example you can easily get them in Deployment requested stage as a vRO8 payload in inputProperties variable

Payload for Deploy requested Stage

But what if you want to have access to your inputs data later in deployment process? You can of course make a REST call to vRA, get the deployment data and in deployment JSON you will find all the inputs. But REST calls also cost some time, and if you do a lot of them, this will add up to your VM deployment time.

Deployment JSON data
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Multiple Disks in vRA8 Blueprint

For MS Windows deployments I’m adding a multiple disks to a VM. This way I hope to be able to add second day operation for disk expiation directly on a device, which should improve user experience. The question is how to create disks input and then how to translate this in to multiple devices of different sizes connected to a VM?

Lets start with disk form input. This is what we are looking for:

Disk Input data

YAML code below should build this input for you.

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Adding PowerShell Server to vRO 8 with Kerberos Authentication

If like me, you still have to use SCCM for windows deployment automation, then you will be forced to add PowerShell Server endpoint to your vRealize Orchestrator. This is the only way I know of interacting with SCCM and SCOM 🙁 Additionally windows colleagues wont make it easy for us and force us to use kerberos authentication :).

Here is how you configure it.

To add PowerShell Server to vRealize Orchestrator 8, a new Kerberos config file must be created at: “/data/vco/usr/lib/vco/app-server/conf/krb5.conf”

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[Quick Hint] How to Restart vRealize Orchestrator 8.x

As we all know vRO 8 is now a pod in new vRA 8 deployment. In the past when i wanted to restart vRO service i had several options. VAMI on port :5480 had a restart button, commands service vco-server restart and service vco-configurator restart on cli console or in case of external vRO even VM restart 😉

Now all this tricks do not work anymore instead of this we can terminate and recreate vRO pods. I do it this way. From ssh console:

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[Quick Hint] Disable and Enable of vRA7 Services with vRO workflow

If you need to prevent people form deploying new VMs during a certain times. For example when one of your vRA third-party services are being backup and is offline.

The easiest way to achieve this is to disable the services that contain catalog items which you want to prevent form being deployed.

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Running vRO Workflows from Ansible playbook

I had a need to run vRealize Orchestrator workflow directly form my Ansible Tower.
To do that I wrote a dedicated Ansible module that allows to run any vRO workflow form Ansible playbook. This is useful if you want to reuse automation you already done in vRO or if you are dealing with something that is simple to do in vRO like VUM automation but difficult or impossible otherwise. I’m using it to import bare-metal servers as DynamicType in to my vRA instance.

Ansible library code is also accessible here: https://github.com/oporanski/Ansible_RunvROWorkflow

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vRealize Automation 8 State Machine

vRA 8.x have entirely new deployment workflow model compared to vRA 7.x. The following post is intended to provide an overview and reference to those new states, which correspond to subscribe event topics in vRA 7.x EBS.

Each of thous states allow to run your own own automation task. Therefore the knowledge of what those states are when and in what order they are triggered is important.

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