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Learning vRO Part 7 – Configurations

Today will be a short but sweet look at how to be more efficent when creating vRO workflows.

We will look at configuration items. I have noticed that generally speaking they are not used in the wild or at least the small part of the wild I have visability on. Not sure if this because people are not aware they exist or dont know how to use them. But either way they can save allot of re-work if endpoints change in the furture.

I know I have been in a situation where an endpoint I was using, be it vCenter, infoblox, secret server, AD, powershell host etc has changed and then I think crap what workflows were pointing to that enpoint and have i changed them all, as I dont want nasty calls and tickets come through because a piece of functionality has stopped working.

the solution is Configuration items!!

This way you have 1 place to make the change and everything that is mapped back to that will be updated as well. like having global settings for your workflows.

Lets have a quick look at how to use this in vRO.

1) When you log into vRO, select the design layout and you will see the icon that looks like a piece of paper with a cog on the bottom right. Click this.
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2) Create a new folder or use an existing. Right Click on the folder and select “New Element” Give it a name and hit ok. You will go right into the edit screen for this element. As you will notice its the same as the Attributes section of a workflow.
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3) Now we add attribute or attributes to the Configuration element. For this example I will be using infoblox item. but as mentioned this can be any object type including strings and booleans etc.
We set this like any other attribute in a workflow.
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4) Save and close the config item. We now have a config Item we can use in our workflows

5) In this example I will locate my workflow where I want to use this element, This particular one is reserving an IP for F5 LoadPalancer VIP. as seen in the image below my ipam connection is assigned within the workflow.
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click on the blue 2 way arrow icon which is directly under the Configration Element Icon next to the Value of the Attribute.
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This will open up a window where you can link your configuration items. As seen in the below image I have chosen the one created previously. Once the element is selected click select and we will now see the workflow attribute is linked to the Configuration item.
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Done!!
The workflow will run and work just as it did before. and if I continue to use this for all the workflows, It means if there is a change in the future I have a single place to make the change and not making it on a dozen different workflows wondering if I got them all.

Cheers

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