Category: vRealize Orchestrator

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vRealize Automation and the FlashArray

I want to say this is the culmination of my last almost two years of creating vRealize integration for Pure Storage, but that isn’t the right word. It is a milestone, because there is still so much more cool stuff to be done. Especially with vRealize Automation. In many ways it is just the beginning! But I can now demonstrate Pure Storage FlashArray integration with the whole vRealize stack: Log Insight, Operations, Orchestrator and Automation.

Log Insight has a Content Pack. Operations has the Management Pack. Orchestrator has the Workflow Package. Automation also uses that Workflow Package. Let’s talk about how.

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FlashArray Workflow Package for vRealize Orchestrator

I just put the finishing touches on my workflow packages for the Pure Storage FlashArray for VMware vRealize Orchestrator! Download it here:

https://github.com/codyhosterman/orchestrator

Three important notes on this package:

  1. This is not officially supported by Pure Storage yet, I made this, not our engineering. Treat this like a VMware Fling. We support the underlying REST calls of course, but cannot guarantee support directly on the package (I will supply best effort). We will analyze demand for this though hopefully release a fully supported one in the future. If you like it, or want more, or more frequent updates, please let us know!
  2. This is open source, when you import it, you can edit it all you want, this is not locked down. Though I advise copying a given workflow to a new one so you can edit it and keeping the originals unchanged. This makes troubleshooting easier.
  3. Contribute! Please post your own additions and changes on Github or our community. Let’s see what everyone can do.

The workflow has been tested with vRealize Orchestrator 6.0.3 and 7.0. It should work with older versions as long as they have the REST plugin. From the FlashArray perspective, it requires any Purity version that runs the REST API 1.4 or later. Nothing else really matters, it supports both the 400 series and FlashArray//m.

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vRealize Orchestrator and Invoke a REST Host Workflow

Continuing my recent work on learning vRealize Orchestrator and ran into some funkiness with the “Invoke REST host” workflow, that I wanted to write down so I don’t forget how I fixed/worked around it (which I suppose is the impetus for basically every post I do). Anyways, I am working on a REST-based package for the FlashArray and I was using that workflow and had some trouble. Basically, any REST call I made through it to a REST host seemed to fail.

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Understanding vRealize Orchestrator Authentication with the FlashArray REST API

UPDATE: This is a older post, but after working with vRO for longer and learning a lot more about it I decided I needed to re-write this post. Too much of it was not the best way to do things.

One of the projects that I have recently taken up is figuring out how to leverage vRealize Orchestrator to manage and execute operations on the FlashArray. Managing the FlashArray is rather easy of course, most of the work revolved around getting vRO up and running (note in vRO 7.0 all of this is much easier) and learning the product itself and brushing up on my Javascript. I think vRO is a pretty great tool, just takes some time to figure out as not everything in it is quite intuitive, but it seems well ahead of what is was when I last used it a few years back. Once you get the feel of how to leverage it though, you can see how powerful it could be. I’ve just scratched the surface of it and am already excited on what I can put together.

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vRealize Orchestrator and vSphere 6 SSO Authentication

Starting to mess around with vRealize Orchestrator and just deployed the 6.0.3 vRO appliance. A few gotchas, many of which are well denoted by other blog posts:

  1. DNS, DNS, DNS!! Pre-configure everything and make sure names are correct
  2. Certificates, make sure they are accurate
  3. NTP

One of the first issues I ran into was registering it with my SSO. My setup has two vCenters with two separate but federated Platform Services Controllers. I wanted to authenticate my vRO instance with SSO, not my Active Directory to keep user management a bit more central to VMware. Ran into some fun gotchas. Continue reading “vRealize Orchestrator and vSphere 6 SSO Authentication”