Restoring default vRealize Orchestrator 6 (vRO) workflows after installing to an external database

I’ve always deployed vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) (previously known as vCenter Orchestrator (vCO)) using the embedded database, but since vRO is becoming more and more critical in our environment I’ve decided to explore deploying it in an active/active cluster.  In order to do this you need to install vRO to an external database.  I haven’t look into the possibility of clustering the embedded Postgres database.

I admit that I haven’t read all of the vRO documentation (with vSphere 6 recently coming out there is a lot to read), but I did skim the parts related to installing to an external database and didn’t see anything regarding losing the default workflows that are including in vRO.

When you first deploy vRO you have the following workflows:

After you configure vRO to use an external database you will have the following workflows:

Oh dear.

So how do you get the missing workflows back?  Well, if you knew this would happen, you would have probably backed up all of the workflows and wouldn’t be reading this post.

Backing up the workflows

Here is how to backup all of the workflows:

1. Select Design from the drop down menu.
2. Select the Packages tab.
3. Select the “Export Package” icon.
4. Save the package.  Do this for each package.

Restoring the workflows

After you’ve configured the external database, you can proceed with restoring the workflows.

1. Select Design from the drop down menu.
2. Select the Packages tab.
3. Select the “Import package” icon.

Import the first package.  I don’t know how to export/import all the packages at once.  I’ll update this post if I find out.

It doesn’t too long to import the packages.  The vCenter package takes the longest.

Restoring the workflows from another vRO instance

What if you didn’t backup the workflows?  Well, you’d probably just re-deploy and back them up but you can also restore the workflows from another vRO instance.  You can also use this method to move workflows between vRO instances.

Deploy another vRO instance.  It may be one you are planning to use as the second node in a cluster or one just to use to grab the workflows off of.  Here I’ve deployed another vRO instance and configured it to use DHCP and will delete it once it’s no longer needed.

On the vRO instance you’re restoring the workflows to:

1. Select Design from the drop down menu.
2. Select the Packages tab.
3. Select the “Get remote package” icon.

Enter the information for the new vRO instance.  Since I’ve done zero configuration on it, it has the default username/password of vcoadmin/vcoadmin:

Accept the certificate.

Here you can see that there is only a single package.  This is because I already imported all but one of the original packages.  This is nice because you can work your way through restoring each of the workflows and not have to remember which ones you’ve already imported:

Go ahead and select Import and you’ll see a screen that’s different from the ones we’ve seen before:

Select “Synchronize!” to import the final package.  Now you should have all of your original workflows back.