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vCloud Automation Center – vCAC 5.1 – HTTPS Installation

I have been receiving a lot of questions about HTTPS installations. In this article you will find instructions for performing an HTTPS installation of vCAC 5.1. In this article I am only providing screenshots that differ form the http installation. If you need you can refer to the http insallation documents:

The HTTP Installation instructions are the following:
vCloud Automation Center- vCAC 5.1 – vCAC Manager Installatio
vCloud Automation Cetner – vCAC 5.1 – DEM Installation
vCloud Automation Center – vCAC 5.1 – Laying the foundation
vCloud Automation Center – vCAC 5.1 – Connecting to vCenter

Getting everything in order

Make sure you completed all the items in vCloud Automation Center – vCAC 5.1 – What to know before you install
 
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vCloud Automation Center – vCAC 5.1 – Custom Property of the Day #1 – Operating System

Property of the day is a new series I’m starting where I will cover a different custom property each day. This is the first property of the day check back each day for a new property.

POTD #1 Operating System
 
vCAC version: 5.1
 
Property Name
 
VMware.VirtualCenter.OperatingSystem
 
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vCloud Automation Center – vCAC 5.1 – Preventing vCAC from Deleting Destroyed Virtual Machines

The default behavior in vCAC when destroying a vSphere virtual machine is to delete it completely and permanently.  In some environments and use cases, this may not be desired.  Luckily, vCAC allows you to change this behavior.  Instead of deleting them when they are destroyed, you can configure vCAC to power off virtual machines and move them to a folder called VRMDeleted in the vSphere Datacenter root (if this folder doesn’t exist, vCAC will create it on first use).  This can be especially helpful if you are troubleshooting post-provisioning or guest customization problems, as you will be able to investigate inside the guest operating system after the failure.

This setting is changed on the vSphere Proxy Agent for each vCenter you would like to affect.  To “turn off doDeletes”, perform the following steps:

  1. Login to the vSphere Proxy Agent system, open a command prompt, and change directories into the program folder for the appropriate vSphere Proxy Agent (%SystemDrive%\Program Files (x86)\DynamicOps\DCAC Agents\agentName by default).
  2. Run this command:
    DynamicOps.Vrm.VRMencrypt.exe VRMAgent.exe.config set doDeletes false
  3. Restart the proxy agent service

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vCloud Automation Center – vCAC 5.1 – Example CMDB Integration

I keep getting asked for an example of integrating into a CMDB. The challenge with this is which CMDB, Asset, or Ticketing system do you create an example around. They are all very different and most organizations have heavily customized them. My solution was to create a sample system to demonstrate vCAC’s capabilities and leave the specifics of any particular CMDB out of the equation.

In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to integrate vCAC 5.1 into an external system of your choosing. In my example I’m using a simple SQL database with a very simple web front end. My workflow is going to call a PowerShell Script that uses SQL statements to update the database with the value I want populated. Now you can take this and have execute code to talk to a specific API or database, btu the point is how to get the data you want from vCAC when you want it and make it usable to push to another system.

I have provided my sample database, web front-end, Workflows,and Scripts download here.
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vCloud Automation Center – vCAC 5.1 – Creating Relational Drop Down Fields

One of the great benefits of vCloud Automation Center is it’s Self-Service capabilities and although vCAC has a great Self-Service experience right out of the gate most organizations are going to want to tailor the request experience match their specific needs. vCAC has many ways this can be done, but one very simple way to do this is through the use of the Property Dictionary. The Property Dictionary allows us to create drop down lists, check boxes, date/time inputs, free form text fields, integer field and other methods of input. In this tutorial I’m going to walk you through using the Property Dictionary to create relational drop down fields that you can leverage to capture additional information from your users at the time of request.

Watch the step-bt-step video tutorial!

Configuring Property Definitions

  1. Go to “Enterprise Administrator“, then “Property Dictionary“, and select “Add Property Definition“.

    2. vcacrddf-1

  2. Give your property definition a “Name” in this example “Datacenter“, assign a “Display Name“, choose the “Control Type” of “DropDownList“, select “Required” and click the green check mark.

    3. vcacrddf-2
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vCloud Automation Center – vCAC 5.1 – Workflow Designer Walk-Through – Add Computer Account to Active Directory OU

OK so in this article we are going to create our first workflow that executes a powershell script that adds a computer account to active directory in whatever OU you would like it to be placed in. Our Powershell script will get loaded in to the Model Manager Repository and we will modify the “MachineRequested” workflow stub to execute our script. Then we will use the workflow stub property to determine for which VM’s we want want the workflow stub to execute.

Dependencies

Active Directory Module for Powershell

  1. Open the Powershell Console
  2. Run “Import-Module ServerManager”
  3. Run “Add-WindowsFeature RSAT-AD-Powershell”

Installation

Create Powershell Script
First thing we need to do is create our powershell script. The script that we will need has to do a few things. It needs to pull values from vCAC that will be used to add the machine to AD. The values we are going to pull are Hostname, DNSDomain, & Active Directory OU. We will use the Hostname and DNSDomain to create the FQDN for the server. The code for the script is below or you can just download it from here.

## Assign Custom Properties from vCAC to variables to be utilized as part of our script.
## Script created by Sid Smith http://www.dailyhypervisor.com
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