Over the last year I’ve been doing a lot of work with vRealize Automation and vCenter Orchestrator.

One thing I have been putting off is learning how to use the vRA REST API.. Why would you really need to when vCO provides you with the necessary interfaces? But with the release of vRA 6.1 came the new REST API, so I decided it was probably time I had a look.

For me, the easiest way to learn your way round an API is to try and solve a problem with it. I used a situation that I came across in a meeting recently as a theoretical problem:

A customer wants to use vRA to manage their resources but wants the provisioning of a resource to fit in with their current processes. They need to be able to trigger a deployment from an external source then run some scripts on the Virtual Machine once it has provisioned.

The steps needed to be as follows:

• Deploy a Virtual Machine from a blueprint.
• Monitor the status of the request through the deployment.
• Finally, return networking information about the provisioned Virtual Machine at the end of the process so that IP address can be passed on to another script for other fun automation things.

First things first, I am not saying that this is the right way to achieve this but it worked for me so I thought I’d document it.

Grab yourself a copy of jquery.corners from here and upload it to where ever you are keeping your customisations.

Also be sure to follow this guy on twitter: Mike Alsup

This is obviously in a million and one places already but I found this simple cmdlet extremely helpful yesterday.

Had a pretty successful meeting today with our Web Dev guy today and managed to finalize our first InfoPath form and Workflow!

We have our InfoPath forms browser enabled & we are using the [%Current Item:Encoded Absolute URL%] lookup as a hyperlink in the email sent by the workflow. When the user clicked the link to the form via their email (which linked directly to the XML document) it would open up in InfoPath filler.. this is not what we wanted…

Ahhh! My first form is almost finished… Just thought i’d blog this function (even though it’s probably hanging arround a million other places on the net).

I needed to ensure a few fields were always lowercase so I applied the translate function as a rule to the required fields:

translate(.,"ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWYXZ", "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwyxz")

”.” (above) referes to the current field.

The rule it self looks like this: