• vRA & UCSD Part 1
• vRA & UCSD Part 2
• vRA & UCSD Part 3

If you’ve been following along, whew!  Last post in this series and likely the easiest.  Let’s do a quick recap.

In our first post we basically went through the process of determining “how do I do what I want to do?”  In our case that was making a REST call to UCSD and kicking off a workflow.  We used the Postman utility to help accomplish this.

In the second post we went through the process of “how do I get vRealize Orchestrator to do what I want to do?”  Here we used some existing sample workflows and made some modifications to do what we wanted, how we wanted.

In this final post we need to expose that workflow to vRealize Automation so that it can be consumed in a catalog.

Continue reading →

• vRA & UCSD Part 1
• vRA & UCSD Part 2
• vRA & UCSD Part 3

OK this is definitely the meatiest part of this series, but bear with me and we’ll get through it.  Before we get started, it is important to note there are a million different ways to skin this cat in vRO.  This is just one that I find to be fairly straightforward.

I will also fully disclose that this is not easy and at times very frustrating.  Some of the vRO stuff is well documented, but some of it is behind curtains and seems to be (on some level or another) different than some of the provided API documentation.  I say that just to say, if you are getting your angryface on while working through some of this, you are not alone.  Hopefully this series will help alleviate some of that frustration! Continue reading →

• vRA & UCSD Part 1
• vRA & UCSD Part 2
• vRA & UCSD Part 3

You might ask yourself, “self, why do I care so much about automation?  Why so much fuss over APIs?”  The truth is the world is changing – this is true everywhere, and especially true in IT.  Automation and APIs are changing the game, allowing you to answer the question, “what can we do?” with “pretty much anything.”

There are a lot of references to VMware vRealize Automation/Orchestration (vRA/vRO) and Cisco UCS Director (UCSD) REST APIs from the vendors, but I thought I would post some findings and methodologies around rolling your own integrated solution.  I’m specifically going to work through calling a UCSD workflow with a vRA XaaS (a.k.a. vRO workflow) blueprint, but you can use this methodology to add any REST functionality through vRA for most anything.  APIs allow us the opportunity for endlessly integrated solutions…as long as you’ve got the time and patience to develop them! Continue reading →