Category: vRealize Orchestrator

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Documentation Update, Best Practices and vRealize

So a few updates. I just updated my vSphere Best Practices guide and it can be found here:

Download Best Practices Guide PDF

I normally do not create a blog post about updating the guide, but this one was a major overhaul and I think is worth mentioning. Furthermore, there are a few documents I have written and published that I want to mention.

  1. FlashArray Plugin for vRealize Orchestrator User Guide
  2. Implementing FlashArray in a vRealize Private Cloud

Continue reading “Documentation Update, Best Practices and vRealize”

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Introducing the FlashArray Plugin for vRealize Orchestrator v1.0

This is a blog I have been waiting a long time to write. The past year and a half of my work has heavily focused on improving and building our VMware vRealize integration at Pure Storage. Log Insight and Operations Manager integration already existed (analytics etc.), so the next logical step is actually provisioning (orchestration). So vRealize Orchestrator and Automation. The first step I took was using the built-in REST plugin in vRO to build a workflow package that customers could use to actually manage the FlashArray without much work on their own part inside of vRO.

I started to realize that a workflow package was not enough. Especially when it comes to vRA Anything-As-A-Service integration. A big part of what is missing from a workflow package is custom objects and inventory management. Something that a plugin can easily achieve. So, without further ado–please meet the FlashArray vRO plugin! Downloadable at the VMware Solution Exchange and fully certified by VMware and Pure Storage:

FlashArray vRO Download

My vRO plugin white paper Continue reading “Introducing the FlashArray Plugin for vRealize Orchestrator v1.0”

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Creating a new Virtual/Hard Disk with vRealize Orchestrator

First off, there already is a built-in workflow for adding a new virtual disk so this isn’t exactly groundbreaking knowledge, but I think it is helpful to understand how it is constructed. Furthermore, most of the existing posts and community articles out there assume way too much about ones knowledge of reading the API guide and understanding what is needed.

So let’s boil it down to only what you need to know to create default, commonly used virtual disks. If you want more advanced configurations this should give you a good starting point. Knowing the basics makes it way it is easier to edit and change.

I will write this post on adding a new virtual disk and next I will write one on removing one.workflow Continue reading “Creating a new Virtual/Hard Disk with vRealize Orchestrator”

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1.7 Release of the FlashArray Workflow Package for vRealize Orchestrator

Finally starting to catch up on work after VMworld. A lot of blog posts queued up in my head that I want to start getting out. Here is the first. I have completed an update of the FlashArray workflow package with some bug fixes and some new workflows. As always the workflow package can be found here:

https://github.com/codyhosterman/orchestrator/blob/master/com.purestorage.codyhosterman.package

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Continue reading “1.7 Release of the FlashArray Workflow Package for vRealize Orchestrator”

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vRealize Orchestrator, TLS 1.2 and Certificate Importing

As I have blogged about before, TLS 1.0 and SSL v3 were deprecated in Purity 4.7, requiring all connections to use either TLS 1.1 or TLS 1.2. This affected a variety of integrations, some we updated, some you just had to alter their behavior. A few VMware products do not/did not use TLS 1.1/1.2 by default, so they either need to altered or upgraded. This almost invariably boiled down to the JDK version that was in use. vRealize Orchestrator is no exception.

vcologo

Continue reading “vRealize Orchestrator, TLS 1.2 and Certificate Importing”

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Running UNMAP with vRealize Orchestrator

Let me start out with saying I’m embarrassed I have only been using vRO for 8 months or so. It is AWESOME.

The FlashArray Workflow Package for vRealize Orchestrator has been updated to include two new objects:

  1. Auto-expand datastore policy template
  2. Workflow to run UNMAP on a datastore

The creation of the first part is explained in this post. But if you are using the FlashArray it is all built into the package, so you have to do very little work. I’ll explain in a bit.

The UNMAP workflow is generic–it can be used with any VMFS datastore that supports UNMAP. So it is included in the workflow package and it is also standalone for those of you who don’t have a FlashArray. You can get the standalone here:

https://github.com/codyhosterman/orchestrator/blob/master/vmfsunmap.workflow

Continue reading “Running UNMAP with vRealize Orchestrator”

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Automatic VMFS expansion with vCenter SNMP and vRealize Orchestrator

Virtual disk oversubscription is becoming increasingly common and so is allowing people to provision their own VMs. So increasing a datastore capacity is also an increasingly common operation. Because of the performance of flash, merged with ESXi features like VAAI ATS. Expanding a VMFS is easy. Expanding a storage volume these days is easy. But you still have to actually do it. What if I want to automate the process to respond to datastore capacity threshold limits? There are a variety of ways to achieve this. Let’s look at it via vCenter SNMP alerts and vRealize Orchestrator workflows. Continue reading “Automatic VMFS expansion with vCenter SNMP and vRealize Orchestrator”

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Increasing VMFS capacity with vRealize Orchestrator

I am working on adding some functionality to the FlashArray workflow package for vRealize Orchestrator and one of those features is automating the process to increase the capacity of a VMFS volume. The FlashArray potion of that is pretty straight forward but what of the VMFS portion? Not much on the internet directly about this. Luckily using the vCenter SDK with vRO, this is pretty easy. Continue reading “Increasing VMFS capacity with vRealize Orchestrator”

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Pure Storage vRealize Orchestrator Workflow Package v1.2

I just released the 1.2 version of the Pure Storage FlashArray Workflow Package for vRealize Orchestrator. Like always, you can get this from GitHub:

https://github.com/codyhosterman/orchestrator/

If you haven’t looked at our vRO workflow package, check out my original post here:

FlashArray Workflow Package for vRealize Orchestrator

While this isn’t a huge release in terms of new features, I think it is an important one because it adds (among others) one particularly important workflow. Translating a VMFS datastore object into a FlashArray volume name. Let’s take a look.

Continue reading “Pure Storage vRealize Orchestrator Workflow Package v1.2”