vAutomation

Remove vRA VM Expired Snapshots

Published by luke on 17th November 2019

Allowing users to create snapshots against VMs using vRA (vRealize Automation) is great, however left unchecked could cause an issue with snapshots growing too large. I created a vRO workflow that can delete snapshots after they expire. Set the workflow to run on a schedule and never worry about snapshots growing too large ever again. Instructions Download the dev.vautomation.expiredsnapshots.package zip file below Extract the zip file to get the vRO (vRealize Orchestrator) package file Import…

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Manage vRA VM Custom Properties using vRO

Published by luke on 10th November 2019

Custom properties (or property definitions) in vRA (vRealize Automation) are very flexible, allowing you to store information against a VM. These custom properties can be used to filter on event subscriptions or the values can be extracted and used within vRO (vRealize Orchestrator) workflows and actions. The downside is once these custom properties have been set during a build they are not easy to change, not to mention if you create new custom properties they…

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Manage Event Subscriptions for a Tenant using vRA API

Published by luke on 8th November 2019

Event subscriptions in vRA (vRealize Automation) are very flexible, allowing you to customise more or less anything you want using vRO (vRealize Orchestrator) code. Since event subscriptions are created in each tenant they can be a bit of a nightmare to manage, especially when things need to change and all tenants should have the same subscriptions. I created a couple of vRO workflows that can “Get” and “Set” event subscriptions via the vRA API. This…

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Generate SSL Certificate on Windows

Published by luke on 3rd November 2019

SSL certificates are needed for a variety of reasons and depending on your environment it can be very easy or very hard to get the certificate(s) you want created. This is a nice easy method of generating a certificate on Windows. Put the below text into a file and save it as “{FQDN}.inf”. All the value between { and } should be changed to your required values, other than the 2.5.29.17 = “{text}” line, this…

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Arrival of vRealize Automation (vRA) 8

Published by luke on 1st November 2019

vRealize Automation (vRA) 8 has arrived but it might as well be called something else, it is that different to previous versions. The first and probably major difference to mention is the architecture. Previous versions involved having the vRA appliance (running postgres) and Windows servers including a Microsoft SQL database running the IaaS components. vRA 8 combines all these components into a single appliance running kubernetes containers. You can see the VMware reference diagram below…

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Hide Domain Drop Down on vRA Tenant Login Page

Published by luke on 24th October 2019

Ever wanted to hide the domain drop down on a vRA (vRealize Automation) tenant login page? This vRO (vRealize Orchestrator) package contains a workflow and actions to allow just that, making vRA (vRealize Automation) more secure and user friendly. Running the workflow will change your tenant login page from this: to this: Instructions Download the dev.vautomation.tenantlogin.package zip file below Extract the zip file to get the vRO (vRealize Orchestrator) package file Import the vRO (vRealize…

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VMware NSX Initial Setup

Published by luke on 2nd October 2019

This tutorial will explain how to setup VMware NSX. NSX 6.4.0 was used for this tutorial, other NSX versions follow the same setup but you may notice some differences as you go along. 1) Deploy the NSX Manager OVA using vCenter (it doesn’t have to be deployed in the same vCenter you will be using it in). Select the relevant Cluster, VM Folder, Storage & Network (for management of NSX Manager) settings in the OVA…

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Previous Blog

Published by luke on 4th July 2019

I have been running my CompITSolutions Blog since 2012 and it is now starting to look a bit tired. I have to confess I also haven’t put as much stuff on there as I should. I decided to create this new blog to inject a fresh new look and even managed to pick up a swanky new domain 😉 I will start to move over any useful posts from my previous blog but more importantly…

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vRealize Automation (vRA) 7.x NSX XaaS Resource Actions Issue

Published by luke on 15th November 2018

I experienced this issue when working on a particular platform, it was a weird one and took some trial and error to fix so thought I would document it. The Issue When trying to view a NSX XaaS provisioned item it would just display a blank white page. Also if a resource (day 2) action was attempted on the provisioned item a red ‘internal error’ box would be displayed and so the resource (day 2)…

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Sysprep Fails on Windows 2008 R2 with PowerShell 5.0 Installed

Published by luke on 29th December 2017

I experienced this issue when working on a particular platform, it was a weird one so thought I would document it. The Issue I tried to deploy a VMware VM from a Windows 2008 R2 Template which had PowerShell 5.1 installed – Windows Management Framework (WMF) 5.0, however OS customisation would not complete. I tried to manually run sysprep within Windows too but that failed. Looking at the sysprep logs showed the error… “Sysprep_Generalize_MiStreamProv: ****…

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