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Getting Started with the Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu REST API

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An extremely powerful capability of Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu is not just getting application data and custom information into App Transformer, but that you can also easily extract that information and use that for a number of other scenarios including but not limited to internal true up of your deployed applications versus what is currently in your Change Management Database (CMDB), inventory analysis across your application vendor and/or versions for auditing, licensing and compliance to identifying vulnerable software versions. The use cases for App Transformer certainly span beyond just App Modernization and can truly be endless!


The App Transformer UI is just one way in which users can interact with the solution but for more advanced workflows or automation purposes, users can also leverage the App Transformer REST API. In this blog post, we take a look at how to get started with the App Transformer REST API.

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Using vRO REST API to execute a workflow with SDK objects

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I was working on something last week which involved vRealize Orchestrator and I wanted to execute a vRO worklfow but rather than using the UI, I wanted to use the vRO REST API. Although there are a couple of blog posts such as this one which demonstrates how to use the vRO REST API, they all use a very simple workflow that only contains string inputs. In my opinion, this does not actually reflect practical workflows which usually contains a mix of strings but also SDK-based objects like vSphere VMs, ESXi hosts, Networks, etc.

It actually took me awhile to wrap my head around how to call these more complex workflows using the vRO REST API and after a ton of trial/error and some help from Kasey Linden and one of the vRO Engineers, I now have a method in which users can follow to identify the required payload for a given vRO workflow when using the vRO REST API. The instructions below is using the latest vRO 8.0.1 release which has a new HMTL5 UI, it has been awhile and I am not sure when this new UI was introduced but the instructions may work for older clients but I would recommend standing up the latest version for developing your automation.

Step 1 - Retrieve the vRO workflow ID by selecting the workflow in the vRO UI. In the example below, my Tag a VM workflow ID is 9d95c7f5-a563-413f-af42-fd7e09275216

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ESXi host with network redundancy using NSX-T and only 2 pNICs?

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In todays data centers, it is not uncommon to find servers with only 2 x 10GbE network interfaces, this is especially true with the rise of Hyper-Converged Infrastructure over the last several years. For customers looking to deploy NSX-T with ESXi, there is an important physical network constraint to be aware of which is quickly mentioned in the NSX-T documentation here.

For example, your hypervisor host has two physical links that are up: vmnic0 and vmnic1. Suppose vmnic0 is used for management and storage networks, while vmnic1 is unused. This would mean that vmnic1 can be used as an NSX-T uplink, but vmnic0 cannot. To do link teaming, you must have two unused physical links available, such as vmnic1 and vmnic2.

As shown in the diagram below, an ESXi host with only two physical NICs can not provide complete network redundancy as each pNIC can only be associated with a single switch (VSS/VDS or the new N-VDS) as pNICs can not be shared across switches.


For customers, this means that you need to allocate a minimum of 4 pNICs to provide redundancy for both overlay traffic and non-overlay VMkernel traffic such as Management, vMotion, VSAN, etc. This is much easier said than done as not all hardware platforms can easily be expanded and even if they can, there still is a huge cost in expanding the physical network footprint (switch port, cabling, etc).

UPDATE (06/12/18) - As of NSX-T 2.2, which was recently released, there is now a UI in NSX-T Manager for managing the migration of VMkernel interfaces to the N-VDS. For automation purposes, you may still find this article useful but now you have option of using the UI.

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