XaaS – Cody Hosterman

This is a blog I have been waiting a long time to write. The past year and a half of my work has heavily focused on improving and building our VMware vRealize integration at Pure Storage. Log Insight and Operations Manager integration already existed (analytics etc.), so the next logical step is actually provisioning (orchestration). So vRealize Orchestrator and Automation. The first step I took was using the built-in REST plugin in vRO to build a workflow package that customers could use to actually manage the FlashArray without much work on their own part inside of vRO.

I started to realize that a workflow package was not enough. Especially when it comes to vRA Anything-As-A-Service integration. A big part of what is missing from a workflow package is custom objects and inventory management. Something that a plugin can easily achieve. So, without further ado–please meet the FlashArray vRO plugin! Downloadable at the VMware Solution Exchange and fully certified by VMware and Pure Storage:

FlashArray vRO Download

My vRO plugin white paper Continue reading “Introducing the FlashArray Plugin for vRealize Orchestrator v1.0”

So this one was driving me a bit nuts. In short, I was provisioning resources in vRA using XaaS (Anything as a Service) via vRealize Orchestrator workflows. In some situations the action items appeared for a given item type, and in other situations it did not for that same item type. Let me explain…

The resource in question is, in this case, a FlashArray snapshot. But that being said, it doesn’t really matter. Any custom resource will behave this way.

I also have some custom actions assigned to that type of resource (a FlashArray snapshot). So once I “own” that item in vRA I can do stuff to it (restore a datastore, create a new datastore, etc.).

So i noticed that some of my snapshots didn’t have all of my custom items assigned to it. Some did. Some didn’t. I had no idea why. Continue reading “Missing Actions for Specific vRealize Automation Custom Resources”