Installing the Pure Storage vSphere Plugin with vRealize Orchestrator

A few months back I published a new PowerShell cmdlet for installing the Pure Storage vSphere Client Plugin. Get-PfavSpherePlugin and Install-PfavSpherePlugin. This works quite well and we’ve had a fair amount of use of it so far, but another place we are certainly investing in right now is vRealize Orchestrator and continuing to enhance our plugin. Filling in any gaps around workflows and actions, especially on initializing an environment is important.

One of those gaps was installing the vSphere Plugin. One common use case we have seen around vRO is day 0 config, but day 2 stuff is done in vCenter (deploying VMs, datastores, etc). So the vSphere Plugin comes in handy here. So how do I install it from vRO?

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Pure Storage Plugin v3 for vRealize Orchestrator

We just released an updated plugin for vRO today that is fully certified by VMware and is available on the VMware marketplace:

Download it here.

What are the new features? Well a lot–some various bug fixes, but this is mostly about new features:

  • ActiveCluster support
  • Enhanced protection group information
  • Throughput limits
  • Volume Groups
  • Pure1 REST API integration
  • Protocol Endpoints
  • Host Personality
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vRealize Orchestrator VVol Workflow Package

Ok finally! I had this finished awhile ago, but I wrote it using our version 2.0 plugin–so I couldn’t post it until the plugin was certified by VMware. That plugin version is now certified and posted on the VMware Solution Exchange (see my post here).

Moving forward, we will likely be posting new workflows in various packages (working on an ActiveCluster one now), instead of including them directly in our plugin. This will make it easier to update them and add to them, without also having to generate an entire new plugin version.

So first, download and install the v2 FlashArray plugin for vRO and then install my workflow package for VVol on the VMware Solutions Exchange:

https://marketplace.vmware.com/vsx/solutions/flasharray-vvol-workflow-package-for-vro-1-0?ref=search 

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FlashArray Plugin 2.0 for vRealize Orchestrator

We have published the FlashArray plugin 2.0 for vRealize Orchestrator on the VMware Solutions Exchange! Download it here:

https://marketplace.vmware.com/vsx/solutions/pure-storage-flasharray-plugin-for-vmware-vrealize-orchestrator-2-0-0

We put a lot of work into this one and I am quite excited for customers and partners to start using it.

There are three primary enhancements:

  1. New workflows
  2. New actions
  3. New scriptable objects

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Building your own Web Client Plugin with vRO

So over the past two years or so I have been talking up vRealize Orchestrator quite a bit. And a fair amount of that conversation was based on the eventual usage of vRealize Automation. While I certainly feel vRA is a GREAT use case for vRO, the usefulness of vRO does not in any way require vRA.

A common question I get is, “hey can you add this feature to the official FlashArray Plugin?”. The answer is often “maybe” or “eventually” but sometimes even “no”. The plugin is centered at the satisfying the majority and therefore sometimes does not exactly meet your requirements.

So with these two things in mind, what is the connection? Well, using vRO (which is FREE when you have vCenter) you can easily build your own. Especially when you install the FlashArray vRO plugin.

I see a couple advantages here:

  1. Start learning vRO. Using default workflows so you don’t have to “code” anything. Then start with some more customization as you become familiar.
  2. Provide tailored workflows in the vSphere Web Client
  3. Interface-agnostic workflows. As you move forward and use the HTML-5 interface, or vRA you don’t have to redo your work.

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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”

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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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.

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vRealize Orchestrator and Invoke a REST Host Workflow

Continuing my recent work on learning vRealize Orchestrator and ran into some funkiness with the “Invoke REST host” workflow, that I wanted to write down so I don’t forget how I fixed/worked around it (which I suppose is the impetus for basically every post I do). Anyways, I am working on a REST-based package for the FlashArray and I was using that workflow and had some trouble. Basically, any REST call I made through it to a REST host seemed to fail.

schema Continue reading “vRealize Orchestrator and Invoke a REST Host Workflow”