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barrettpatrick
Contributor
Contributor

vRO - Reading/Writing to a file on Windows NAS

Hello,

I am looking for a way to read/write files on a Microsoft Domain NAS via vRO Workflows/Actions.

I don't see anything built in that will accomplish this though. There is the FileWriter, but I don't think there is a way to pass in credentials that have access to the NAS. I've tried using the "Change credential" prior to a scriptlet that uses FileWriter, but I get: "exception: Unable to login new credential 'username', reason : SSO server error"

I believe PowerShell is an option, but I was wondering if there was another way that I am just not seeing.

If PowerShell is the direction to go, is there a best practice when it comes to securely supplying credentials to create a file (or read a file's contents)?

- Patrick
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barrettpatrick
Contributor
Contributor

Hi,

Thanks for the quick reply!

I did previously see that link about vCO and mounting the drive. I was just looking for an easier way, as I have no control over the vRO/vRA server itself. It also sounds like a pain to set up for each environment, on top of the upkeep for service account passwords.

What about doing the same via PowerShell instead? Or is that not an option in vRO?

- Patrick
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iiliev
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

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qc4vmware
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

What I've done for these sorts of things is create a windows utility host vm.  I have it loaded up with powershell and have the plugin configured but for most things we just execute a windows command line (even if it is a powershell command).  We initate these calls via the guest os tools.  We have a whole system for managing these utility style hosts that can handle multiple hosts for failover and distributing the load of requests.  In our environment we have a bunch of services which rely on hosts that run cli's that are maintained by the service owner so we've done this to front end those situations.  We kind of broadly consider windows related stuff like one of these services if that makes sense.  We handle quite a bit of windows sysadmin style tasks including file smb style file transfers.

You could also run ssh/scp on a windows host and possibly do your file transfer that way.

I don't know of a particularly elegant way to interact with windows directly from orchestrator now that there is no longer a windows installable version of vRO.

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