Overview

This post will show you how to configure the built-in version of vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) that comes with vRealize Automation 6.2 (vRA).  In upcoming posts I’ll build on this and show how you can have vRA call vRO during virtual machine provisioning to rename and add a VM to Puppet.  My goal is to continue making posts that will show how you can use vRA and vRO to create a portal that will provide virtual machine provisioning to multiple types of environments and integrating with technologies such as Puppet, Infoblox, Service Now, NSX, etc.

At this point I assuming that the vRA appliances have already been deployed and configured.

The version of vRO that comes with vRA 6.2 is actually 6.0, which hasn’t been released as a standalone package yet, so if you wanted to get your hands on it early, you could deploy a vRA appliance, disable the vRA services, enable the vRO services and connect to it to check it out.  See External vRealize Orchestrator appliance becomes unavailable after upgrading to VMware vRealize Automation 6.2 in a distributed environment for more info on this.

Verifying vRO Services

Normally to start configuring vRO you would go to landing page at https://vra62a.vmware.local:8281/vco/, but if you try to do this on the vRA appliance, you’ll receive an error.  This is because the vRO configurator service is not running by default.

1) ssh or open a console to the vRA core appliance.

2) Verify that the vco-configurator service is not running:

vra62a:~ # service vco-configurator status
Status-ing tcServer
Instance name:         configuration
Runtime version:       7.0.55.A.RELEASE
tc Runtime Base:       /var/lib/vco/configuration
Status:                NOT RUNNING

3) Start the service:

vra62a:~ # service vco-configurator start
Starting tcServer
Using CATALINA_BASE:   /var/lib/vco/configuration
Using CATALINA_HOME:   /opt/vmware/vfabric-tc-server-standard/tomcat-7.0.55.A.RELEASE
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /var/lib/vco/configuration/temp
Using JRE_HOME:        /usr/java/jre-vmware
Using CLASSPATH:       /opt/vmware/vfabric-tc-server-standard/tomcat-7.0.55.A.RELEASE/bin/bootstrap.jar:/opt/vmware/vfabric-tc-server-standard/tomcat-7.0.55.A.RELEASE/bin/tomcat-juli.jar
Using CATALINA_PID:    /var/lib/vco/configuration/logs/tcserver.pid
Tomcat started.
Status:                RUNNING as PID=17717

Now you can access the vRO landing page by going to

https://vra62a.vmware.local:8281/vco/

4) Select Orchestration Configuration

5) The default username and password is vmware/vmware

You’ll be required to change the password.

6) There isn’t much we need to do in here for now.  If you’d like, you can go to the Authentication section and change the vRO admin group so you can log in with a domain account.

This built-in version of vRO comes with the vRA plug-in already installed as well as other plug-ins that used to have to be installed separately:

7) Before we try to connect to vRO with the client, make sure that the vRO server is running:

vra62a:~ # service vco-server status
Status-ing tcServer
Instance name:         app-server
Runtime version:       7.0.55.A.RELEASE
tc Runtime Base:       /var/lib/vco/app-server
Status:                RUNNING as PID=4587

8) If it’s not, you can start it with:

service vco-server start

Connect with the vRO client

1) Go to the vRO landing page at https://vra62a.vmware.local:8281/vco/

2 ) Select Start Orchestrator client

3) I believe that the username format needs to be in the same format that you would use to log into the vRA web portal.  This depends on how you set up your identity source.  I’m using an identity type of Active Directory where my domain is vmware.local with an alias of vmware.

In this section you will see both vCAC and vRA used interchangeably.

4) Once you’re in the vRO client, select Run and then the workflows tab:

Here you can see the workflow folders that are provided by the vRA plug-in.

5) Next, select the Inventory tab and you can see that the vCAC host has been automatically:

So all we need to do is to add the vRA IaaS host.  There is a new workflow that we can run that automatically picks up the IaaS host, which makes the process simpler.  This process was more complicated and didn’t work as well in prior versions of vRA.

6) From the Inventory tab, browse to Library > vCloud Automation Center > Configuration > Run the workflow “Add the IaaS host of a vCAC host”

1. Select “Not set”
2. Browse to your vRA/vCAC host
3. Confirm

7) The next page should be pre-populated:

8) I’m using shared session mode:

9) vmware.local is the name of my domain:

10) Submit the workflow and hopefully it will succeed:

11) Now the inventory tab will show you the new IaaS host where you can browse the contents:

Conclusion

In this post we configured vRO be be aware of vRA so we can have a two way communication between the two.  In an upcoming post, we will install the vRO customizations into vRA.