Today, I saw a message from one of our outstanding Technical Account Managers at VMware, @stevetilkens. Steve wanted to know if there was a vRealize Operations action for restarting a guest OS on a monitored virtual machine. So, I thought I would show everyone how easy this is with the Management Pack for vRealize Orchestrator. You may have heard, the 2.0 version released very recently and has created a lot of excitement with customers who want to automate routine tasks based on vRealize Operations powerful analytics and proactive monitoring.
In this quick post, I will assume you have read my previous blog on how to install, configure and enable your own workflows with the management pack. vRealize Orchestrator includes a library of workflows for vCenter and other plugins, and I checked to make sure there was already a workflow that could do what Steve wanted. Sure enough, the “Reboot guest OS” workflow is already there, so I don’t even need to write a new workflow… which is a little sad because I like writing workflows.
Also, the “Reboot guest OS” workflow is ready to use with the management pack, since it only requires a single input for a VC:VirtualMachine object type. As you may recall from my previous post, this allows the workflow to be used as an action and because it is the only input it can be automated as part of an alert recommendation. For now, I will just add it as an action for virtual machine objects in vRealize Operations.
In vRealize Operations, from the vRealize Orchestrator dashboard, I select my vRO instance and click the action menu where I can find the “Create/Modify Workflow Action on vCenter Resources” action.
In the action, I scroll down to the “Reboot guest OS” workflow, associate it with object type “Virtual Machine” and select “Add” to associate the workflow to the action menu for VMs. Click “Begin Action” to complete the task.
You may need to wait about 5 minutes for the action to show up. To verify, simply browse to a virtual machine object and click the action menu to see if the workflow is there.
Notice when I run the action, it automatically fills in the name of the VM, so all I have to do it click “Begin Action”
The action runs the vRO workflow, and my VM reboots as you can see in the console.
So, it is that easy to add an action to vRealize Operations with the Management Pack for vRealize Orchestrator 2.0! Thanks Steve Tilkens for the idea and the suggestion to blog this.
