Native vRO vCenter Tagging - No Powershell

Native vRO vCenter Tagging - No Powershell

This workflow will apply vCenter tags to a Virtual Machine using web calls to the vCenter SDK and inventory services, no powershell jump host required.

You must create 2 new rest hosts:

  1. https://<vcenter fqdn>:443
  2. https://<vcenter fqdn>:10443

When you run the workflow, it will prompt you for:

  1. SDKRestHost (#1 listed above) - used to issue calls to SDK
  2. InvRestHost (#2 listed above) - used to issue calls to Inventory
  3. User - Username with rights to apply tags in vcenter
  4. Password - Password of the user
  5. Virtual Machine - The virtual machine you want to apply tags to
  6. Tags - a list of tag names you want to apply to the virtual machine.

Currently tested with:

  • vRO 6.0
  • vCenter 5.5

vRO 6 is required as it uses the new Switch and Default Exception items. If there is enough interest I can backport it to vCO 5.5.

Use at your own risk, test in development environment first etc. etc...

-James

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Hi James & thanks for the workflows!

I wanted to create something similar and searched the web before I started to see if something like this already exists - an boom: there you go.

One question remains - maybe you can help me with this: is there any particular reason why you choose using the REST API rather then the vRO vCenter 6.0 Plugin API?

Hey,

While the vCenter plugin API may lead you to believe you can achieve tagging, it doesn't actually support it. There have been discussions around when this support will be added, but no hard release date from VMWare has been supplied.

A workaround to this was to create a Windows Powershell jump host with PowerCLI loaded, and run the associated CLI commands from vRO. I didn't want that extra dependencies, and frankly have never had much luck with the powershell plugin so I created this set of workflows.

Thanks,

James

Hi James,

I have been testing it with vCenter 6.0, but I could not add the InvRestHost as it keep timing out. Digging it a big, and that port is not listed any more as one of the ports used by vCenter 6.0. Would you by any chance know which port can be used instead on vCenter 6.0.

Regards,

Eiad Al-Aqqad

Consulting Architect @ VMware

B: http://www.VirtualizationTeam.com

T: @VirtualizationT

Eiad, have you tried this newer package from Christophe?

vRO vCenter 6 Tagging plug-in

Hi Burke,

Would you by any chance have the instruction to configure the new package by Christophe, as the video in there just show how to use it after it was configured. I am having some difficulty getting it working.

Regards,

Eiad Al-Aqqad

Consulting Architect @ VMware

B: http://www.VirtualizationTeam.com

T: @VirtualizationT

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‎05-26-2015 12:04 PM
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