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vRealize Automation: Part 5 – Working with vCAC Virtual Machine Linked Entities

February 15, 2019February 15, 2019 Gavin Stephens

This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series vRealize Automation Developer Master Series

In my previous post vRealize Automation: Part 4 – Working with vCAC Virtual Machine Entities, I demonstrated how you could find vCAC virtual machine entities and retrieve and update their properties. In this post I am going to focus on linked entities.

All code that I have provided or talked about in this post can be downloaded as a vRO package for your consumption here.

There are additional properties that can be retrieved which are part of other entities that the virtual machine has a relationship with. Here are some examples of information that can be retrieved through linked entities (the code for all of these examples is included in the package link provided at the beginning of this post).

Host/Cluster Name
Reservation Name
Owner Username
IPv4 Addresses
Snapshots
Networks

The virtual machine entity object has a method ‘.getLink(vcacHost, “linkKey_string”)‘ that can be used to get the linked entity objects. The ‘.getProperty(“key_string”)‘ can then be used on these entities to get a specific property value, such as the reservation name.

Get the Host or Cluster Name

The following code can be used to get the host or cluster name that the virtual machine (this is referred to as the compute resource within the vRA portal) is hosted on.

/**
 * Get the compute resource name for the vcac virtual machine entity.
 * @param {vCAC:VCACHOST} vcacHost - The vCAC Host.
 * @param {vCAC:Entity} vcacVmEntity - The vCAC virtual machine entity.
 * @returns {string} Returns the compute resource name.
 */

/**
 * This function validates input parameters.
 * @param {vCAC:VCACHOST} vcacHost - The vCAC Host.
 * @param {vCAC:Entity} vcacVmEntity - The vCAC virtual machine entity.
 */
function checkParams(vcacHost, vcacVmEntity) {
    var inputErrors = [];
    var errorMessage;
    if (!vcacHost || System.getObjectType(vcacHost) !== "vCAC:VCACHost") {
        inputErrors.push(" - vcacHost missing or not of type 'vCAC:VCACHost'");
    }
    if (!vcacVmEntity || System.getObjectType(vcacVmEntity) !== "vCAC:Entity") {
        inputErrors.push(" - vcacVmEntity missing or not of type 'vCAC:Entity'");
    }
    if (inputErrors.length > 0) {
        errorMessage = "Mandatory parameters not satisfied:\n" + inputErrors.join('\n');
        log.error(errorMessage);
    }
}

var logType = "Action";
var logName = "getComputeResourceNameForVirtualMachineEntity"; // This must be set to the name of the action
var Logger = System.getModule("com.simplygeek.library.util").logger(logType, logName);
var log = new Logger(logType, logName);
var hostEntities = [];
var hostEntity;
var hostName = "";
var hostId = "";
var vmEntityName = "";
var numHostEntities = 0;

try {
    checkParams(vcacHost, vcacVmEntity);
    vmEntityName = vcacVmEntity.getProperty("VirtualMachineName");
    log.log("Getting compute resource name for virtual machine entity: " + vmEntityName);
    hostEntities = vcacVmEntity.getLink(vcacHost, "Host");
    numHostEntities = hostEntities.length;
    if (numHostEntities > 1 ) {
        log.error("More than one compute resource was found.");
    } else if (numHostEntities > 0) {
        hostEntity = hostEntities[0];
        hostName = hostEntity.getProperty("HostName");
        hostId = hostEntity.getProperty("HostID");
        log.log("Found compute resource '" + hostName + "' with entity id '" + hostId + "'");
    } else {
        log.error("No compute resource was found.");
    }
} catch (e) {
    log.error("Action failed to get compute resource name for virtual machine entity.",e);
}

return hostName;

/**

* Get the compute resource name for the vcac virtual machine entity.

* @param {vCAC:VCACHOST} vcacHost - The vCAC Host.

* @param {vCAC:Entity} vcacVmEntity - The vCAC virtual machine entity.

* @returns {string} Returns the compute resource name.

/**

* This function validates input parameters.

* @param {vCAC:VCACHOST} vcacHost - The vCAC Host.

* @param {vCAC:Entity} vcacVmEntity - The vCAC virtual machine entity.

function checkParams(vcacHost, vcacVmEntity) {

var inputErrors = [];

var errorMessage;

if (!vcacHost || System.getObjectType(vcacHost) !== "vCAC:VCACHost") {

inputErrors.push(" - vcacHost missing or not of type 'vCAC:VCACHost'");

}

if (!vcacVmEntity || System.getObjectType(vcacVmEntity) !== "vCAC:Entity") {

inputErrors.push(" - vcacVmEntity missing or not of type 'vCAC:Entity'");

}

if (inputErrors.length > 0) {

errorMessage = "Mandatory parameters not satisfied:\n" + inputErrors.join('\n');

log.error(errorMessage);

}

var logType = "Action";

var logName = "getComputeResourceNameForVirtualMachineEntity"; // This must be set to the name of the action

var Logger = System.getModule("com.simplygeek.library.util").logger(logType, logName);

var log = new Logger(logType, logName);

var hostEntities = [];

var hostEntity;

var hostName = "";

var hostId = "";

var vmEntityName = "";

var numHostEntities = 0;

try {

checkParams(vcacHost, vcacVmEntity);

vmEntityName = vcacVmEntity.getProperty("VirtualMachineName");

log.log("Getting compute resource name for virtual machine entity: " + vmEntityName);

hostEntities = vcacVmEntity.getLink(vcacHost, "Host");

numHostEntities = hostEntities.length;

if (numHostEntities > 1 ) {

log.error("More than one compute resource was found.");

} else if (numHostEntities > 0) {

hostEntity = hostEntities[0];

hostName = hostEntity.getProperty("HostName");

hostId = hostEntity.getProperty("HostID");

log.log("Found compute resource '" + hostName + "' with entity id '" + hostId + "'");

} else {

log.error("No compute resource was found.");

}

} catch (e) {

log.error("Action failed to get compute resource name for virtual machine entity.",e);

}

return hostName;

Log output:

[] [I] [Action: getComputeResourceNameForVirtualMachineEntity] Getting compute resource name for virtual machine entity: SG-BG-Deliv0005
[] [I] [Action: getComputeResourceNameForVirtualMachineEntity] Found compute resource 'SITEA-CLS-CLOUD-01' with entity id '355c617e-f9e0-4726-abcf-81f5748c50db'

1 2	[] [I] [Action: getComputeResourceNameForVirtualMachineEntity] Getting compute resource name for virtual machine entity: SG-BG-Deliv0005 [] [I] [Action: getComputeResourceNameForVirtualMachineEntity] Found compute resource 'SITEA-CLS-CLOUD-01' with entity id '355c617e-f9e0-4726-abcf-81f5748c50db'

Continue reading →

vRealize Automation: Part 4 – Working with vCAC Virtual Machine Entities

February 15, 2019February 15, 2019 Gavin Stephens

This entry is part 4 of 5 in the series vRealize Automation Developer Master Series

In the first post in this series, vRealize Automation: Part 1 – IaaS & Understanding The Entity Framework I detailed how you can view the vCAC entities and their associated properties. In this post I am going to cover how you can find a virtual machine entity using different property references and get/update their properties in your vRO workflows. I had intended to provide a single post for this, but felt it would be useful to provide a number of posts, for each specific vCAC entity type. In this post I am going to be looking at the vCAC virtual machine entities.

All code that I have provided or talked about in this post can be downloaded as a vRO package for your consumption here.

Finding vCAC Virtual Machine Entities

When I need to find a vCAC virtual machine entity, there are 4 search references that work well for all of my use cases. These are to search by:

VirtualMachineID – The entity ID.
VirtualMachineName – The VM name. Take caution as it’s possible to have duplicate entities with the same VirtualMachineName.
VMUniqueID – The unique identifier for the vm (i.e. vCenter VM instance UUID).
ExternalReferenceId – The external reference id (i.e. vCenter VM Id (MoRef)).

I have provided all the Actions below which perform these searches and an example log output for each.

Find Virtual Machine By Entity Id

The following code can be used to get the virtual machine entity by its entity id.

/**
 * Searches for a vcac virtual machine entity by its entity id.
 * @param {vCAC:VCACHost} vcacHost - The vCAC Host.
 * @param {string} virtualMachineId - The virtual machine entity id.
 * @returns {vCAC:Entity} Returns the virtual machine entity.
 */

/**
 * This function validates input parameters.
 * @param {vCAC:VCACHost} vcacHost - The vCAC Host.
 * @param {string} virtualMachineId - The virtual machine id.
 */
function checkParams(vcacHost, virtualMachineId) {
    var inputErrors = [];
    var errorMessage;
    if (!vcacHost || System.getObjectType(vcacHost) !== "vCAC:VCACHost") {
        inputErrors.push(" - vcacHost missing or not of type 'vCAC:VCACHost'");
    }
    if (!virtualMachineId || typeof virtualMachineId !== "string") {
        inputErrors.push(" - virtualMachineId missing or not of type 'string'");
    }
    if (inputErrors.length > 0) {
        errorMessage = "Mandatory parameters not satisfied:\n" + inputErrors.join('\n');
        log.error(errorMessage);
    }
}

var logType = "Action";
var logName = "findVirtualMachineEntityByVirtualMachineId"; // This must be set to the name of the action
var Logger = System.getModule("com.simplygeek.library.util").logger(logType, logName);
var log = new Logger(logType, logName);
var properties = new Properties();
var vcacVmEntity;
var vcacEntityFieldName = "VirtualMachineID";
var entitySetName = "VirtualMachines";
var vcacVmName = "";


try {
	checkParams(vcacHost, virtualMachineId);
    log.log("finding virtual machine entity with entity id: " + virtualMachineId);
	properties.put(vcacEntityFieldName, virtualMachineId);
	vcacVmEntity = System.getModule("com.simplygeek.library.vcac.entities").getVcacEntitiyByUniqieId(vcacHost, 
                                                                                                     entitySetName, 
                                                                                                     properties);
	vcacVmName = vcacVmEntity.getProperty("VirtualMachineName");
    log.log("Found virtual machine entity: " + vcacVmName + " with entity id: " + virtualMachineId);
} catch (e) {
    log.error("Action failed to locate vCAC virtual machine entity.",e);
}

return vcacVmEntity;

/**

* Searches for a vcac virtual machine entity by its entity id.

* @param {vCAC:VCACHost} vcacHost - The vCAC Host.

* @param {string} virtualMachineId - The virtual machine entity id.

* @returns {vCAC:Entity} Returns the virtual machine entity.

/**

* This function validates input parameters.

* @param {vCAC:VCACHost} vcacHost - The vCAC Host.

* @param {string} virtualMachineId - The virtual machine id.

function checkParams(vcacHost, virtualMachineId) {

var inputErrors = [];

var errorMessage;

if (!vcacHost || System.getObjectType(vcacHost) !== "vCAC:VCACHost") {

inputErrors.push(" - vcacHost missing or not of type 'vCAC:VCACHost'");

}

if (!virtualMachineId || typeof virtualMachineId !== "string") {

inputErrors.push(" - virtualMachineId missing or not of type 'string'");

}

if (inputErrors.length > 0) {

errorMessage = "Mandatory parameters not satisfied:\n" + inputErrors.join('\n');

log.error(errorMessage);

}

var logType = "Action";

var logName = "findVirtualMachineEntityByVirtualMachineId"; // This must be set to the name of the action

var Logger = System.getModule("com.simplygeek.library.util").logger(logType, logName);

var log = new Logger(logType, logName);

var properties = new Properties();

var vcacVmEntity;

var vcacEntityFieldName = "VirtualMachineID";

var entitySetName = "VirtualMachines";

var vcacVmName = "";

try {

checkParams(vcacHost, virtualMachineId);

log.log("finding virtual machine entity with entity id: " + virtualMachineId);

properties.put(vcacEntityFieldName, virtualMachineId);

vcacVmEntity = System.getModule("com.simplygeek.library.vcac.entities").getVcacEntitiyByUniqieId(vcacHost,

entitySetName,

properties);

vcacVmName = vcacVmEntity.getProperty("VirtualMachineName");

log.log("Found virtual machine entity: " + vcacVmName + " with entity id: " + virtualMachineId);

} catch (e) {

log.error("Action failed to locate vCAC virtual machine entity.",e);

}

return vcacVmEntity;

Log output:

[] [I] [Action: findVirtualMachineEntityByVirtualMachineId] finding virtual machine entity with entity id: 05b6a7b4-1cd6-4762-85ce-fe427c33496a
[] [I] [Action: findVirtualMachineEntityByVirtualMachineId] Found virtual machine entity: SG-BG-Deliv0005 with entity id: 05b6a7b4-1cd6-4762-85ce-fe427c33496a

[] [I] [Action: findVirtualMachineEntityByVirtualMachineId] finding virtual machine entity with entity id: 05b6a7b4-1cd6-4762-85ce-fe427c33496a

[] [I] [Action: findVirtualMachineEntityByVirtualMachineId] Found virtual machine entity: SG-BG-Deliv0005 with entity id: 05b6a7b4-1cd6-4762-85ce-fe427c33496a

Continue reading →

Advanced vRA Data Collection vRO Workflow

February 9, 2019February 9, 2019 Gavin Stephens

Data Collection in vRealize Automation is a process that keeps the vRA database in sync with endpoints such as vCenter Server. Most people reading this most likely already know how clunky this process is. Also, It’s not immediately obvious how this process can be automated from a vRO prospective. If you are performing any tasks against objects on your endpoints, such as day 2 actions that add or remove hard disks, networks, etc (and not using the OOTB reconfigure actions) then you almost certainly need to be able to programmatically invoke the data collection process to update all the information in vRA.

I have come across many different snippets of code that solved parts of the problem but were far from perfect and the code was ugly. I therefore decided to create something to make this process easy, whilst providing some additional quality of life features. So I present my Advanced Data Collection workflow for your pleasure.

Continue reading →

Resolve vRA/vCAC VM to vCenter VM

January 30, 2019February 15, 2019 Gavin Stephens

I wrote this post some time ago but I felt that it didn’t include some other use cases where you would want to resolve a vCenter virtual machine. I also previously used code that was provided by the vRO appliance that I wasn’t too keen on (logging was a bit light and there was code to search using the BIOS UUID, which we don’t care about). I have therefore updated this post to reflect the following use cases:

Find the vCenter VM by its instance Uuid when using the Event Broker;
Find the vCenter VM by its instance Uuid on a specific vCenter Server;
Find the vCenter VM by its name, on a specific vCenter Server and a specific folder;
Find the vCenter VM by its MoRef id on a specific vCenter Server;

Hopefully, there should be enough code provided here to help you achieve your goal no matter what your scenario. However, if you need something different, then feel free to contact me and I will try to help. Continue reading →

vRealize Automation: Part 3 – Performing CRUD Operations on IaaS Entity Objects

January 14, 2019February 15, 2019 Gavin Stephens

This entry is part 3 of 5 in the series vRealize Automation Developer Master Series

In a previous post vRealize Automation: Part 1 – IaaS & Understanding The Entity Framework I detailed what the Entity Framework is and how objects and their properties could be discovered using an application called LINQPad.

This post is going to detail how we can interact with the IaaS servers and work with the objects within the Entity Framework. I have also written a number of actions that provide a standard interface to use when working with the entities and perform CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations on them.

Note: these actions are designed to be used with wrappers for your code (i.e. other actions performing a task, which call these actions) and not directly in your workflows (although there is no real harm if you want to, it’s just cleaner not to). Continue reading →

vRealize Automation: Part 2 – Dynamically Discover vCAC and vCACCAFE endpoints in vRO

October 30, 2018February 15, 2019 Gavin Stephens

This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series vRealize Automation Developer Master Series

When I work with endpoints in vRO, I like to use actions to discover these instead of hard coding them as attributes or within configuration elements. Hard coding of these endpoints requires manual configuration steps when moving code between environments, which is not ideal. I felt it would be a good idea to include this post early on within this series, as these hosts are often dependencies when working with a lot of my code.

All code that I have provided or talked about in this post can be downloaded as a vRO package for your consumption here.

Discover vRealize Automation Infrastructure (vCAC IaaS) Endpoint

You will generally only have a single vCAC IaaS endpoint in your vRO inventory. I have never worked in an environment where there was more than one. Therefore, the action I have created below requires no inputs and will attempt to discover this single vCAC IaaS endpoint. If you have more than one host for some reason then it should be fairly easy to incorporate this. Continue reading →

Upgrading External vRO Appliance to 7.5 (for vRA 7.5)

October 17, 2018February 9, 2019 Gavin Stephens

Oh what a joy of an upgrade this one was. Not that it was too difficult, just a tad annoying that an inline upgrade was not possible (or maybe just not supported?, I dunno) and the only way to upgrade to vRealize Orchestrator 7.5 was through a new deployment of the external appliance and migrating the content and settings across. Anyway, I thought it might be useful to others to document the process that I followed to achieve this (and as a future reminder to myself).

Before you begin

This process documents the steps to upgrade a single, standalone appliance but the steps are almost identical for a cluster. If you are using a cluster, then ensure the load balancer is disabled and that the databases are in sync before proceeding. You are responsible for ensuring that all your appliances, virtual machines, databases, etc are backed up and/or snapshot before attempting to perform the upgrade.

Make sure to also snapshot the target vRO server! If anything goes wrong during the migration, then you will need to revert to this snapshot before you can attempt the migration again. Continue reading →

vRealize Automation: Part 1 – IaaS & Understanding the Entity Framework

March 8, 2018February 15, 2019 Gavin Stephens

This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series vRealize Automation Developer Master Series

vRealize Automation 7.x is currently in a sort of ‘split brain’ where there exists two data models which can be used to interact with vRA objects. One is objects that are backed by the Cafe appliance / PostgreSQL database and the other which uses the older, entity framework (IaaS servers).

This post is going to focus on the entity framework, which is still very relevant when working with this version of vRA. There are many things that still do not exist in the newer data model, such as custom properties and data collection. I still see vRO/vRA developers struggle with this, so I hope to help improve the situation.

The Entity Framework

When I first worked with vRA, I struggled to understand how objects were stored and manipulated in the database. I often came across a common object class called an entity. I later discovered that all objects stored in the vRA database are considered ‘entities‘. This is because vRA has been developed with Microsoft’s “Entity Framework“. A brief description of this taken from http://www.entityframeworktutorial.net

The Microsoft ADO.NET Entity Framework is an Object/Relational Mapping (ORM) framework that enables developers to work with relational data as domain-specific objects, eliminating the need for most of the data access plumbing code that developers usually need to write. Using the Entity Framework, developers issue queries using LINQ, then retrieve and manipulate data as strongly typed objects. The Entity Framework’s ORM implementation provides services like change tracking, identity resolution, lazy loading, and query translation so that developers can focus on their application-specific business logic rather than the data access fundamentals.

Entity framework is an Object/Relational Mapping (O/RM) framework. It is an enhancement to ADO.NET that gives developers an automated mechanism for accessing & storing the data in the database.

The ‘domain-specific objects‘ reference is key here and are defined as:

Domain objects are represented by entities and value objects that exist within a domain layer. These objects contribute to a common model and are exposed as a data service, which is also provided by the entity framework.

The entity framework is a layer of abstraction that sits on top of the underlying relational database (SQL Server). This abstraction allows developers to work within a standard framework. Yes, you could run SQL queries on the underlying database directly, but this gets really ugly and isn’t supported.

LINQ is Microsoft’s .NET Language-Integrated Query (language).

What is also important to note is that entities follow some form of continuity and identity (i.e. they must all have certain attributes, such as an ID field or callable methods). This standard allows for a consistent interaction with the domain objects.

In the case of vRA, all domain-level objects (entities) are provided under the ‘ManagementModelEntities.svc‘ data service model. Within this data service model, entities are organised into their own ‘tables’, known as ‘Entity Sets’, and entities can also link to (relate to) other entities. Getting an understanding of the entities will make your life as a vRA/vRO developer so much easier. Continue reading →