Tag: Aria Automation Page 3 of 4

Recently, I was asked by a customer to deploy a custom NSX-T firewalling solution for their virtual machines, where virtual machines owned by an Aria Automation user are allowed to communicate with virtual machines of the same user. The solution leverages NSX-T firewall rules based on groups, where the group membership is defined based on NSX-T tags attached to a virtual machine.

To achieve the custom tagging of virtual machines in NSX-T during the VM deployment phase in Aria Automation, I developed a Orchestrator workflow leveraging the capabilities of the NSX-T API.

In this blog post, I’ll demonstrate how to use the NSX-T API from Orchestrator.

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vRealize Automation provides pre-defined application and services life cycles operations which require customizing this life cycle via extensibility. This lifecycle extensibility is applied through the Event Broker Service (EBS).

vRealize Automation 8.x provisioning event topics are designed with a set of high level topics calling deployment resources topics. Event topics trigger when particular events occur in vRealize automation; examples are:

• When a cloud template is deployed
• When the resources in a deployment are allocated
• During a life cycle state and entity change
• When an approval policy is triggered
• When Day-2 operations are requested

The following event topics are defined in vRA for the provision lifecycle phase (image taken from the official VMware documentation):

In this example we’re going to have a more detailed look on the lifecycle of a virtual machine during the provisioning.

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With vRealize Orchestrator 8.1 or higher it is possible to use PowerShell, NodeJS, and Python for tasks in vRealize Orchestrator workflows in addition to the traditional Javascript. As PowerShell support was added, it wasn’t necessary to add a PowerShell host to run PowerShell scripts anymore.

We can now use the following runtimes in our action and workflow scripts:

• Python 3.7
• Node.js 14
• PowerCLI 11/Powershell 6.2
• PowerCLI 12.3.0/Powershell 7.1

OOTB, the PowerCLI runtime includes PowerShell and the following modules:

• VMware.PowerCLI
• PowerNSX
• PowervRA

But to use additional modules in these polyglot scripts, we had to include dependencies by adding them as a ZIP package, which was a quite tedious work.

With vRealize Orchestrator 8.8 or higher, we can now add modules and libraries for use in our vRealize Orchestrator scripts as dependencies directly from the vRealize Orchestrator Client.

In this example, we’ll investigate how to create a script environment with an additional module for PowerShell.

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