Connecting vRealize Orchestrator 7.6 to vCenter

Do note, this is not a "best practice" guide, more a documentation on how I did configuration in my home lab

Most likely the first thing that you want to do with your Orchestrator, is to add your vCenter instance to your Orchestrator, so you can run workflows against it.

To do that, let's log in to your Orchestrator HTML5 Client.

Go to workflows. We need to search the right workflow for us. Use two keywords, "add" and "vcenter", and we should be able to find a correct workflow

Click "RUN" on "Add a vCenter Server instance" workflow to start it.

Give your vCenter IP or FQDN to form. You might also want to check "Do you want to ignore certificate warnings? If you select Yes, the vCenter Server instance certificate is accepted silently and the certificate is added to the trusted store", at least if you are using self-signed certificates.

Go to "Set the connection properties" tab, and give username and password that are used to connect to vCenter. 

Click "Run", and wait for workflow to run.

If everything goes as expected, you should see that status is "completed".

You can now go to Administration -> Inventory, and you should be able to see your vCenter inventory from here:

We have now succesfully added our vCenter instance to Orchestrator!

Installing vRealize Orchestrator 7.6

VMware vRealize Orchestrator has changed quite a lot, and it now has a brand new HTML5 client, which is the default one. You can still use legacy client, but there can be some compatibility issues between workflows done with new vs. legacy client.

Do note, this is not a "best practice" guide, more a documentation on how I did installation in my home lab

Orchestrator comes as an ova file, so deploying it is quite straight forward, and I'm not going to through that process.

But, after you have done the initial deployment, this is what I did.

I first logged in to https://<appliance ip>:5480, to check if there are any updates available. Well, there was none at that time.

Next I went to Control Center. You can find it by going to front page of your appliance, https://<appliance ip>:8281/vco/ (or by going to http://<appliance ip>, which will redirect you there) and selecting "Start the Control Center"

It will ask you for you root / pass, that you provided during deployment of .ova

First we configure a host name:

Then authentication. Since I do not have vRealize Automation, I did choose vSphere as authentication mode, and gave it my vCenter address:

You need to click "accept certificate" first.

Give account that you use to connect to vCenter:

 After that, you need to select Admin group that has access to vRO, and you are done.

Now you should see vRO Control Center

If you want, you can test that authentication works, by going "Configure Authentication Provider -> Test Login"

Now you should be able to login to your Orchestrator Client, go to front page of your appliance, and select "Start the orchestrator client"

For the first time, it gave me this:

But after logging out of my vCenter, I was able to log in succesfully. It should give you your vCenter login page:

And after giving credentials,we are logged in to our brand new HTML5 based orchestrator client!

vRealize Orchestror, "Hello World!" and VM query

In first vRealize Orchestartor post, we connected Orchestrator to vCenter

Now it's time to create our first workflows.

With new tool, you always need to do a 'Hello World' first, so let's do it.

I have created a folder called 'vLAB', and under that, we create new workflow.

Give it a name 'Hello World'

In workflow editor, on Schema tab, drag'n'drop 'Scriptable task' to workflow, between start and end icons.

Click Pencil icon on top of 'Scriptable task' to edit it.

In script editor, on Scripting tab, write:
System.log("Hello World!");

And hit Close.

Now we can run our Workflow, by clicking 'Run' button, on Schema tab of Workflow editor.

And in Log tab, we can see output! We have successfully run our first workflow!

Cool! Now let's do something more productive. Let's get all VM's that we have in our VMware environment.

So, create new Workflow named 'Get All Virtual Machines' and add action 'getAllVMS', that is built-in action, and then add Scriptable Task, so it should look like this:

getAllVMs action will return all VMware Virtual Machines, so we need to set up Attribute (predefined variable) to our workflow. So, go to 'General' tab in workflow editor, and add new Attribute by clicking 'A+' icon

It will create attribute named 'att0'. It's a good idea to rename it, so click that name to rename it, we will name it 'AllVMs'

Then click on 'string', to change type of this Attribute. Set type to 'Array of...' and search 'VC:VirtualMachine'.

Now we need to direct values from 'getAllVMs' action to our attribute 'AllVMs'. So go back to 'Schema' tab, and hit Pencil icon on top of 'getAllVMs' action.

Go to 'Visual binding' tab, select 'actionResult' and 'drag' it to top of 'AllVMs', to connect it.

Next, edit 'Scriptable Task', and go to 'Visual Binding'.

Drag 'AllVMs to empty space in center of windows, at 'IN' side, so it should look like this:

Now we can use information inside 'AllVMs' in our Scriptable task.

Go to 'Script' tab, and write:

System.log(AllVMs);

(Do note, since this is javacript, almost everything is case sensitive....)

And now we can run our workflow, and we should get list of our VMs in 'Log' tab.

So, we have made our first two Workflows. 

In next posts, I'll show how to utilize that data, to do actions against those VMs.

vRealize Orchestrator, connecting to vCenter

I have been working with vRealize Orchestrator for almost a year now, and I think that it's a hidden jewel in VMware stack. But I have to admit, it's not easiest tool to start playing with, so I'm planning to write about some things that I have done with it, starting with very basic stuff, and maybe at some point some more complicated (and more useful) stuff.

One of the first things to do, is to add your vCenter server to your Orchestrator. In Orchestrator, go to a workflow: "Library / vCenter / Configuration / Add a vCenter Server instance".  Right click workflow and select "Start workflow..."

I have vCenter appliance in address vcsa01.vlab.dom, so I add that to first field. Then I change last option (Ignore certificate warnings) to Yes and click next



On next page, we set-up account to be used when connecting to vCenter. I'm using my vCenter servers SSO-domain, so account is vlabsso.dom\administrator, you could also use AD service account dedicated for this. I also chose to use this account always when using orchestrator, so answer to first question is 'No'



After submitting this worklow, if everything goes well, we have added our vCenter to Orchestrator. You can add multiple vCenters to one Orchestrator.

To see that vCenter was added succesfully, go to inventory tab, and see that you can browse your vCenter environment.



Now we have succesfully added vCenter to our Orchestrator.

Next post: first workflows