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Integrating vCenter Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) with vRealize Orchestrator 

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VMware vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) is still used by many of our customers to automate various infrastructure tasks whether that is running it in standalone mode connected to a vCenter Server(s) or powering the extensibility of vRealize Automation. For customers who have already built an extensive collection of vRO workflows, it certainly makes sense that they would like to reuse the Automation they have already created.

For customers that want to easily subscribe to specific vCenter Server event(s) and trigger specific Automation workflows, the vCenter Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) Fling has been a very popular solution. Customers no longer have to write or manage the code to retrieve specific event(s) from vCenter Server, instead they can focus on the really interesting part of the workflow which is automation or "business logic" that does something specific with a given vCenter Server event. Some common examples including notification using Slack or SMS, vSphere automation such as applying a vSphere Tag or hardening a VM configuration to alerting using PagerDuty to ticket creation in ServiceNow or Salesforce.com, the list goes on and on.

The great news is that vRO customers can also benefit from VEBA while leveraging their existing vRO workflows. VEBA can integrate with any vRO workflow by simply having a function, written using any language of your choice, that calls into the vRO's REST API to trigger a specific vRO workflow. To demonstrate this integration, I have built VEBA function using PowerShell which executes a vSphere Tagging vRO workflow which can be found here and below is a video on how this works.

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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Configuring Standalone vRealize Orchestrator with VMware Cloud on AWS

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vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) is powerful workflow engine that many of our customers have been using to automate across a number of different VMware and 3rd party solutions. It is also a foundational component to vRealize Automation (vRA) and it enables our customers to build end-to-end IT and Developer workflows across different Clouds: Private, Public and Hybrid.

It should come as no surprise that existing vRO/vRA customers would like to take advantage of VMware Cloud on AWS and be able to add its vCenter Server instance to vRO for Automation purposes. A few weeks back, I had heard mixed results from our field and customers when attempting to add VMware Cloud on AWS vCenter Server endpoint to vRO. I was actually working with another customer on a related topic and I decided I give this a try in my lab, which was running the standalone vRO 7.5 Appliance.

I did indeed run into a problem when attempting to add vCenter Server as an endpoint in vRO. It turns out this was due to a bug with the vSphere vRO Plugin which has since been resolved with the latest vRO 7.6 release. In any case, there is a simple workaround for customers that are currently not running the latest vRO appliance and you can find the instructions below.

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