Anyone have a working example of a create a business group workflow? What I have fails and not sure what I am missing

[sbeaver]

My use case I am using Service Now approval groups as Business Groups and I am looking for a process to create the business group on the fly if it is not present

Cheers!!

[pizzle85]

I can share our vRA on boarding scripts. We essentially have a web form that customers fill out that submits a REST call to a vRA for an XaaS blueprint that kicks off some vRO workflows to build a new vRA business group. The process goes out and creates some AD stuff, then pauses while i manually sync the directory, then we manually run a second script that actually builds the business group. We're looking at updating the process to use the vRA REST API to call the sync as part of the workflow.

[pizzle85]

Fair warning. This was one one of the first workflows i built and since it works we haven't really touched it. We write all our resource specs (including vRA business groups) to a local database and read from that source to do our builds. Building a reservation from scratch was a real PITA through the SDK so i opted to just clone off a reservation instead, i also considered using PowervRA but didn't want to shell out as we really only give our customers two entitlements, one for each of our Availability Zones and they're all standard until they need more infrastructure resources.

Hope this helps.

[r0j]

Thanks pizzle...

Been looking for something like this for a while.

Started to build our own...

Question, what ResourceElement is the workflow referring to?

The rest of the missing resources are self explanatory.

Also, regarding your AD sync, this post provides the how to, and we have it working kicking off a workflow so users can immediately log on after onboarding.

https://www.automate-it.today/automated-directory-synchronization-of-the-vra-identity-manager/

RJ

[sbeaver]

Thank you all for responding.  As it turns out my issue was trying to add the user's ID instead of the full principleID.  Using the short name caused the workflow to return invalid argument

[pizzle85]

Are you referring to the scriptConfigurationResource? If so, we use the guest script manager package to run scripts. That attribute just points to a PowerShell script to tag the vCenter folder we create in spinning up the new business group.

[r0j]

@Pizzle85

if you define the vCenter folder on the business group, doesn't the folder gets created once the first catalog item is deployed?

what is the reasoning for the script creation?

[pizzle85]

Yes, that’s true and is actually included on all our business groups, if you look in the script before the business group creation workflow we build our BG custom properties array and that’s one of them. In our case we were already a service provider for our University and were migrating customers with existing VMs into vRA. Because of this they might not actually create any VMs for a while but we still needed a folder for their existing VMs to live in. Another issue was permissions on the vCenter folder. We grant all our customers user permissions on their vCenter folders so they can log in directly to do things in the event vRA is unavailable and to view real-time performance statistics (we also setup access to vROps but that’s another process). Our compromise was to just create the vCenter folder, set permissions, and tag it on business group creation.

[RonPSSC]

Hi Pizzle...

Was wondering if you could export all the elements associated with your Workflow into a complete vRO Package...? There are a number of dependent Worklows, Action Items and Configuration Resource Files missing essentially making this unusable in its current form.

Also, am really hoping you can provide a little more info with the Package as to which particular Attributes or Configuration/Resource elements need to be updated/added in order for another organization to be able to use this.

Finally, You've lost me a bit on the requirement for capturing and writing some of the info to (what appears to be) an SQL DB for eventual source reading afterwards. If you could share more on this, I'd be very grateful......e.g. where is the SQL Resource defined, what type or where is the database user defined that creates the SQL Records, etc.

I sincerely apologize for all the demands and questions but your process is also exactly what I'm looking for..!! Your creative work however is not only innovative but appears very complex to me as well...

Thanks. Ron