vRealize Automation Cloud / 8 - Blueprinting 101 - P2

[@Aakarsh_G]

was able to code my first drop down select VM deployment blueprint with your help thank you

[@VirtualisemeTV]

Awesome, this is great to hear, I will keep trying to find time to push out more videos.

[@PerrySmith]

Your videos are great and easy to understand. Is there a code reference guide that you are aware of that has a list of all the options we can choose? It would come in very handy. No books out on 8.1 and the website doesn't seem to have one. Thanks.

[@VirtualisemeTV]

Thanks heaps for your feedback, very happy the videos are helping others. Umm outside the official doco, I dont know of anything else, I have found much of the stuff by trying things out and playing around, as your right the documentation is very much on the slim side when it comes to some of the capabilities. I am working on trying to address this internally, fingers crossed.

[@shahzadmalik100]

Awesome Scott. Very well explained

[@akshaykirty1221]

Great video and excellent way of explaining. Makes it so easier to learn. I do have a query though... I want to understand how the does the deployed VM actually get backed up if you select the backup option at 19:50 because the specification in the code for the backup is just a boolean entry.

[@VirtualisemeTV]

Hey Akshay, Tank your for the great feedback. So to answer your question all that is doing is setting a tag/custom property what every you need it to be really, this can then be used to kick off a ABX subscription to assign it a backup profile. but the easiest and most common what this works is more enterprise back solutions can use tagging on the VM to decide when and how it gets backed up. by linking this value to a tag the backup solution does the rest for you. while mine was a boolean it could be anything that is required backup:true backup:default or backup:production etc etc. Hope that makes sense

[@akshaykirty1221]

Understood... and yes makes perfect sense coz I know we have a tag as well as a specific NIC attached to VMs in our environment, that are being backed up

[@roger1927]

Great Video Scott. its possible to put in the blueprint a variable ( input ) for the end user catalog set the OS hostname

[@VirtualisemeTV]

Thank you very much, Yes you absolutely can have an input to name the server. While this is ok at a small scale. I would always recommend deriving the name automatically through the use of inputs dropdowns like app-env-location-number and auto increment, It would be done the same way except the automatic one would be done via ABX or workflow on submission.

[@pascaltube8434]

Hello Scott, I cannot agree more on other comments here. Amazing and highly simplified. Thanks a lot for these video series. It is worth or equal to a training. But I"m missing 1. Code Editor extension. The Code editor is really clumsy and not a good place to write 1000 lines of code. Do you have any idea about the extension coming in VS Code. It is must to have or either reference. e.g. I was unsure how the Tags has completely different parameters as others. 2. Where can I find the properties a particular object has e.g. you mentioned Type is mandatory. Is there a place I can find. I see you replied below to Perry Smith, but I see this a critical requirement. e.g. If go to Cloud Formation Template, I find every property for every object. Hope you can push this within VMware. I think you agree? or this is already somewhere. Hope the answer is yes and Thanks again for your value time putting this here.

[@VirtualisemeTV]

Thanks heaps for the great feedback, happy to see my ramblings come across in an easy to follow way :) I hope I can answer your questions: 1) I agree, the web base code editor while a million times better now than in the original release, it cant beat a good editor like VSCode. I know internally there is an extension that is being worked on. Outside the videos in day to day work I will use VS code without the extension but would be handy to have intellisense or some vRA specific liniting. This reminds me I will follow up on the progress of this extension. For your example it the Tag property of a cloud.machine is of type array but an array of objects (json key/value) so I knew I need an input to match that. I do get what your saying this is not immediately obvious. 2) I agree there needs to be a quicker more convenient way to see what properties you can use, Most of the time I get the properties from the auto complete in the vRA UI IDE as most are there for the object your working on. When I need more info I usually look at the swagger API documentation, if you have onprem vRA it is /automation-ui/api-docs/ under each section it has the models where you can find the object and all its properties It is not the greatest but its what I use if I need more than what the inbuilt IDE gives. I am 100% pushing the above issues internally, thanks again for the feedback

[@bajajrahul001]

Great Video. Quick question though - Just like we can add machine tags, is it possible to add "Notes" as well ? I am talking about "Notes" section in VM summary page in the vCenter. Can it be done without having to use vRO workflows ?

[@VirtualisemeTV]

Hey Rahul, Thanks heaps for the feedback on the video. As to your question from my understanding as of right now there is no property that will fill in the notes field in vCenter like how tags work. In vRA 7 the property VMware.AttributeN.Name/value was used for this purpose. I know properties and properties groups is something being worked on in v8. Being that v8 focused on Multi-cloud and having all cloud endpoints as first class citizens, some non critical endpoint specific properties haven't make it across initially.

[@bajajrahul001]

@@VirtualisemeTV Thanks for clarifying. Really appreciate it.! Too bad this is missing in 8.x

[@vgianni1]

Hi , great video , many thanks , i 've learned a lot , one question i have , the username and passwd you put in the blueprint , to which part of the vm are invoked ? I know that cloudconfig can set / change usernames/passwords ,Thanks

[@VirtualisemeTV]

No worries glad the video was helpful, The username and password did nothing in this video, purely to demonstrate inputs and setting up the part 3 and part 7 videos. The username and password in part 3 act as inputs into the cloud-init user module to create a local user, In part 7 they are used as inputs for service account and password for SQL install via PowerShell execution.

[@sampathreddy3506]

Hi bro, How to implement decision in blue print ? Let me explain I have 2 Opening systems one is Linux and Other is windows each is having different versions and Linux may have another 2 sections redhat and debian. Can you please explain how to implement if else statement here?

[@VirtualisemeTV]

Hey sampath, if I understand it correctly the way you would achieve this is by using External Values in your BP code, while this has been able to be done using custom forms, this can now be embedded. I will actually try and get a video out today on this very thing.

[@sampathreddy3506]

@@VirtualisemeTV Thank you so much

[@VirtualisemeTV]

@@sampathreddy3506 kzbin.info/www/bejne/q5S0hoNpmt5jb80 hopefully this helps

[@RahulKumar-us7zz]

How can I select existing networks in blueprint request form? I want to provide user an drop down ability to selec existing networks when request virtual machine.

[@VirtualisemeTV]

While this was something that was needed in vRA v6 and v7 as network selection was done via name/id. The way networks and network profiles work is much different. each network can have a capability tag(s) which then needs to match up with a constraint tag(s) on the network part of the blueprint. This constraint can be a drop down for the network selection. This is where a tagging strategy is important . This input can be driven by an action in a custom form too doesn't have to be hard coded in the blueprint. For specific network selection I would use a name tag with the value as the name and use that as the input. I cover the basics of this at the 6:00 mark of this video, I use a networkZone tag but can be anything you specify on the networks.

[@RahulKumar-us7zz]

@@VirtualisemeTV Thanks revert. Understood that network profile must be having capability tags and resultant network can be attached to VM via constraints tags in blueprint. Yes, It can be made available using custom form select external source. But my question is, What vRO action can be called out to make this happen. Is it some external package I need to import in vRO before using such action or any script? My second use case is, When I create on demand logical switch, I want newly created switch to be added into network profile so I can use that newly created logical switch in subsequent deployment. Any recommendation?

[@VirtualisemeTV]

@@RahulKumar-us7zz Ok I get you, unfortunately there is no ootb workflow for this unlike vRA 7 with the vRO plugins. This would require using the rest api to achieve this, it would actually be pretty straight forward thinking about this now but would need to validate. When you deploy a new on demand network you would need to run a subscription that would then add that network into a network profile using a get and patch call to"/iaas/api/network-profiles". Then for the drop down you could either use the same API calls to dive into the profiles or you could use the /iaas/api/networks endpoint to traverse and spit out an array based on the right conditions, I would filter on tags and would need to take into account the current user / project / cloud endpoint so that the network selection is correct, if all these are tags or properties it would make the logic simpler. While it wasn't a drop down list I did the creation of a blank vRA cloud here www.virtualiseme.net.au/index.php/cloud-assembly-automating-the-automater/ and the vro package is available to download. It has some of the building blocks that may be needed.

[@pootiel0ver]

Great walk through!