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ymichalak
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

[vRA 7.5] - Import & Manage physical servers

Hi everyone,

we try to find a solution to manage "Physical Servers" from vRealize Automation 7.5.

SINCE vRA 7 :

No more physical machine templates in vRealize Automation 7

In prior versions, vRealize Automation supported the provisioning of physical machines. Most commonly, they were used for legacy reasons or if virtual or cloud provisioning was not possible anymore (there was still support for HP iLO, Dell iDrac and Cisco UCS). In the new version, this is no longer supported anymore.

Do you know if there is a workaround for importing physical servers into vRA ?

Thx for your help.

20 Replies
daphnissov
Immortal
Immortal

You can write your own plug-in and extensive set of XaaS. Otherwise no.

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ymichalak
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Thx again daphnissov​.......

Do you have more information's or a documentation to write our own plug-in ?

This time google is not very talkative about it :smileylaugh:

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daphnissov
Immortal
Immortal

It would be a vRO plug-in, and you're in for a wild ride if you choose that option. There's not much documentation out there.

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ymichalak
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

And with the Dynamic Types nothing is possible ?

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daphnissov
Immortal
Immortal

Anything's possible. How much work and technical debt do you want to create and own?

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ymichalak
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Ok Ok Smiley Wink ...... It's not a good idea to manage Physical servers with vRA 7.x.

Now it's necessary for us to find a solution. It's not possible for our customer to manage their Machine from different portal.

Thx for your help daphnissov

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daphnissov
Immortal
Immortal

Well, if that's not possible for them to manage a physical machine from a product that isn't designed to manage physical machines, then you better buckle up, buckaroo, because you're in for a long and hard battle with vRO.

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xian_
Expert
Expert

If you don't want/ can't write a plugin, you can do this with Dynamic Types. But still a lot of programming ahead...

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ymichalak
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Thank you both for your advice Smiley Wink

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qc4vmware
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

There is also a rest and soap plugin.  You might be able to put something together using a combination of one of those with they dynamic types.  Without fully understanding what your criteria for success and user experience expectations are its hard for me to judge how much work you are in for. 

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ymichalak
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Thx qc4vmware​,

We want to deliver the same quality of service as for Virtual Machines.

We want a deployment in vRA with Day2 actions available like : Decom, Softwware deployment, etc .......

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xian_
Expert
Expert

I'd implement Redfish​ standard if your physical servers support it. ManageIQ is developed into this direction: Provisioning bare metal servers using ManageIQ

Being open source you can peek into the code to get some ideas: Redfish provider for ManageIQ

This will be a lot of work and a lot of fun, you're lucky if get paid for implementing such a functionality Smiley Wink

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ymichalak
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Thx @xian but we have already an automatic physical provisioning process orchestred by vRO with Ansible and Redfish API for HPe server.

But now we want to embedded these physical servers in vRA portal.

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xian_
Expert
Expert

Sounds great. Then you'll need XaaS services to import and manage the servers. If you already have them provisioned, your provisioning workflow does not do any real provisioning only discovery/import. Also you could create real provisioning XaaS services calling your vRO workflows.

The easiest way IMHO is using Dynamic Types.

ymichalak
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

In vRA we can have an empty deployment (How to delete empty deployments in vRA 7.x (2148996) > VMware Knowledge Base ).

One idea how you can created an empty deployment and link this deployment (with custom properties perhaps) to an existing Physical server.

We don't find how to create just an empty deployment because with bulk import it's necessary to push a Virtual Machine ID (vc:VirtualMachine) and with the import it's necessary to have an object vcac:Virtualmachine to use the register.

It's possible, do you think to create an empty deployment ?

Thx.

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xian_
Expert
Expert

I don't believe you can link a physical server to VC:VirtualMachine...

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daphnissov
Immortal
Immortal

No, you cannot. As I've told OP now a couple times, you have some significant development work ahead of you which is going to result in a mountain of technical debt.

ymichalak
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Hi 🙂

Just another question about Physical Servers management in vRA 7.5.

It's not possible to play with "Custom Resources" ....

We think to create a "Custom Resources > vCACCAFE:CatalogResource" with name "Physical Server".

After we can assign to it  "Resource Actions" with rest API to manage HP physical servers.

Do you think is possible ?

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daphnissov
Immortal
Immortal

You would need a custom resource regardless as this is how you'd map a vRA object to a vRO object. But, still, that gives you nothing because you still have to create all the logic around the what and how. For that, see my previous responses Smiley Wink