Automation

We migrated our product Professional works from physical servers to a high available cloud infrastructure.

Running in-guest scripts on VMs from vRealize Automation

Once I sorted out how to use vRA to deploy VMs with specified virtual hardware configurations, the next big step was to perform actions inside the guest OS to further customize the deployment. I experimented with a few different approaches of varying complexity, but have (for the most part) settled on using vRA's Action-Based eXtensibility (ABX) component. This lets me write PowerShell code to connect to a vCenter through PowerCLI and leverages the VMware Tools connection to gain access inside the guest. From there, I can pass in whatever commands I want.

I wrote a post to document how I'm using ABX to expand a server's C: volume to fill the underlying virtual disk, add specified domain accounts as administrators on the system, configure the firewall, and more: 

https://virtuallypotato.com/run-scripts-in-guest-os-with-vra-abx-actions

Had an interesting question from a field engineer who was installing a Hikvision ANPR camera and needed the alarm output to be 1sec instead of the default minimum 5sec.

I designed a quick 12V XOR Relay circuit to reduce the 5sec output to 1s using a timed on delay relay.

Continuing my efforts to document and share the things I've learned and solutions I've hacked together while working on a VMware vRealize Automation project, I wrote up the details of how I got vRA to register static DNS records in Microsoft DNS by using a Windows SSH host as an intermediary. That let me use the DNS PowerShell cmdlets included in RSAT without complicated nested authentication problems.  
https://virtuallypotato.com/creating-static-records-in-microsoft-dns-from-vrealize-automation

Excited to check out Polywork as early adopters. Lets see if automation with hardware is present here as well?

In this post, I explore two enhancements to the vRealize Orchestrator workflow cobbled together for generating unique hostnames which comply with a defined naming standard:

1. Leveraging vRO's built-in Active Directory plugin to connect to AD and run a search to make sure a computer object with the proposed hostname doesn't already exist.
2. Importing the DnsClient-PS PowerShell module to vRO and using that to query DNS to make sure that hostname doesn't have a record already.

https://virtuallypotato.com/vra8-custom-provisioning-part-three