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Extending VSAN capabilities in the vSphere Web Client using vCO

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One of my favorite features of vCenter Orchestrator is how easy it is to extend an existing vCO workflow and making it available directly in the vSphere Web Client. I think this is still not a very well known feature of vCO, but once you realize the capability of this feature, you will see how powerful it is to be able to provide context aware workflows in the vSphere Web Client. Another thing to be aware of is that vCO also provides full access to the underlying vSphere API, this means you can easily expose new functionality that may not exists in the vSphere Web Client.

A good example of this is a recent workflow that I created to extend some additional VSAN information directly in the vSphere Web Client. I wanted to be able to easily view the number of VSAN components for each of my ESXi hosts. Since this information is available through the vSphere API which I wrote about here, I was able to create a vCO Workflow which exposed this information and then make it available in the vSphere Web Client.

To get started, you will need to download the workflow and an updated vCenter vCO Plugin as it contains a fix for leveraging the VSAN APIs:

In the example below, I am using the vCO Appliance but the steps are very similar if you are using the Windows version.

Step 1 - Upload the o11nplugin-vsphere.dar.zip to your vCO Appliance

Step 2 - Unzip the contents by running the following command:

unzip o11nplugin-vsphere.dar.zip

Step 3 - Run the following command to set the appropriate ownership and permissions:

chmod 644 o11nplugin-vsphere.dar
chown vco:vco o11nplugin-vsphere.dar

Step 4 - Backup the original vCenter vCO Plugin by running the following command:

mv /usr/lib/vco/app-server/plugins/o11nplugin-vsphere.dar /usr/lib/vco/app-server/plugins/o11nplugin-vsphere.dar.bak

Step 5 - Copy the new plugin to the plugins directory by running the following command:

mv o11nplugin-vsphere.dar /usr/lib/vco/app-server/plugins

Step 6 - Restart the vCO Service to load the new plugin

/etc/init.d/vco-server restart

Once the vCO Server is available, you can login to the vCO Client and import the new VSAN workflow. To make the workflow available in the vSphere Web Client, you will need to login to the vSphere Web Client using an account that has access to the vCO Server and the instructions below.

Step 1 - Click on the vCO icon on the home page and then select Manage and Context Actions

Step 2 - Click on the green arrow to add a new worfklow

Step 3 - Browse for the VSAN workflow and then click on the Add button and associate the workflow with a vSphere Cluster object as seen in the screenshot below:

vsan-vco-plugin-0
Once the context workflow has been added, you are now ready to run the new VSAN workflow! Right click on a VSAN enabled vSphere Cluster and under the All vCenter Orchestrator Actions, you should see our workflow:

vsan-vco-plugin-1
Go ahead and run the workflow and once it completes, you can view the results by clicking on the workflow name in the Recent Tasks:

vsan-vco-plugin-2
Under the Parameters section, we can see our input and output variables. In this workflow, I have created a String output called "count" which contains the name of each ESXi host in the VSAN Cluster along with the number of corresponding components.

As you can see, you can easily enhance the functionality of the vSphere Web Client by simply extending it with either out of the box or custom vCO Workflows that you have created. Happy workflowing!

Quick Tip - Automate the export of a vCenter Orchestrator workflow using the CLI

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Steve Jin recently wrote an article about vCenter Orchestrator REST APIs: Executing Workflow which reminded me of an interesting issue that I had faced several months back. I had just finished developing a custom workflow on a beta version of vCenter Orchestrator and of course one of the challenges with using early software is that it could be unstable. I was unable login to the vCO interface via vSphere Web Client or the vCO Client to export my workflow through the regular UI interface. I tried everything and I thought I might have lost my workflow!

I reached out to one of the vCO engineers and asked if there was an easy way to recover my workflow and it turns out there was a very simple method IF the vCO REST API endpoint is still accessible, which it was. To test this, you can either use cURL on the command-line or your favorite REST Client for your browser and perform a GET operation on the following URL (replace the URL with the URL of your vCO Server):

https://vco.primp-industries.com:8281/api/workflows

Note: The vCO REST API is only available starting with vSphere 5.1

If the command was successful, you should see a list of all the workflows in your vCO Server:

I am not aware of any filtering that can be done to narrow down the specific vCO Workflow, but if you are using a browser-based REST Client, you can just search for the name of your workflow. In the above example, I am interested in the "Change Guest OS Type" workflow and you can see its corresponding vCO Workflow ID which is highlighted.

To export and save the vCO Workflow to your local system, you just need to perform a GET operation on the vCO Workflow URL and specify "Accept:application/zip" for the request header which will allow you to save the vCO workflow.

Here is an example using cURL to export the  vCO Workflow and save to a file called ChangeGuestOS.workflow:

curl -i -k -u vcoadmin -H "Accept:application/zip" -X GET https://vco.primp-industries.com:8281/api/workflows/7D808080808080808080808080808080BC818080013141141566711a974a8fef8 -o ChangeGuestOS.workflow

Automate vCenter Orchestrator Configuration Backups

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Last year I wrote an article on how to quickly configure a new vCenter Orchestrator 5.1 appliance which automatically goes through the necessary steps of configuring your vCO appliance and enabling the vCenter Server plugin and associating it with your vCenter Server. These steps are usually performed manually, but when you are looking at deploying multiple vCO instances or even quickly spinning up vCO appliance for testing, this will definitely help speed up your deployment.
Something that I did not consider after completing the vCO setup was backups. Fortunately, this was something that was shared with me recently from a customer who had this exact workflow on backing up their vCO configuration after their initial deployment. This may not be a very well known feature, but vCO provides a very simple mechanism to export your vCO configurations and allows you to restore the configuration in case of a miss-configuration or even deploying a similar configuration to another vCO instance.
Using the same HTTP request trick, to export the vCO configuration you would need to make a request to the following URL:

https://${VCO_IP_ADDRESS}:8283/config_general/ExportConfig_export.action

Similar to the vCO UI, the backup will be stored on the vCO appliance itself and the path will be provided back to you in the message response. To help demonstrate this, I created a simple shell script called backupVCO51.sh which is similar to the setup script in my previous blog article. You can easily take the few lines of code and integrate that with the setup script.

Here is a screenshot of running the backup script:

From the output we can see where the backup configuration is stored on the vCO appliance and you can easily copy the backup to an external system using SCP.

Whether or not you are automating your vCO setup, you should definitely consider performing periodic backups of your vCO configuration, especially before making any changes to your vCO Server.