Caution: Articles written for technical not grammatical accuracy, If poor grammar offends you proceed with caution ;-)
CloudUtil is a vRA(vCAC) repository management tool that is part of the vRA Designer. It actually is what you are launching when you run the designer. When run without parameters it launches the GUI Designer. It however has other functions that can prove useful from time to time.
For starters if you don’t have the Designer Installed you can get it by going to https://FQDNofvCACAppliance:5480 –> IaaS Install –> vCloud Automation Center Designer. When you install it make sure you put in the IaaS host, NOT the vCAC appliance hostname.
I frequently get asked how can workflow revisions be removed from the designer. The answer is they can, but you need a Development Kit license to do so with CloudUtil. Working in the designer you will come to find out that the revisions add up fast and before you know it you could have hundreds. I’m going to walk you through a way to remove the revisions without a Development License for CloudUtil.
First Things First
1. First thing we need to do is open Design Center and then load the workflow version that you want to keep.
2. Once you have that loaded use the save option to save it to a Xaml file on the local hard disk.
3. Now that we have our workflow saved I always like to do a little test to make sure everything is ok. So we are going to use CloudUtil to import our saved workflow to make sure everything is ok. Open a command prompt and navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\vCAC\Design Center and run the following command:
cloudutil.exe Workflow-Update -f c:\myworkflow.xaml -d “Updated to test saved version” -n WFStubBuildingMachine
You will see Command Succeeded if you were successful. Now you can go into the Design Cetner and you will new a new revision. Please examine the workflow to ensure it is correct.
4. Now we need to remove all the revisions for the workflow, but the capability to do so it not in cloudutil unless you have a developer license. The workflows for vCAC are records in a database table. The database table contains the info for the workflow and the xml that you just saved to your xaml file. To remove a version or versions, we simply need to remove the record form the database.
Open SQL Studio –> Expand your vRA(vCAC) Database –> Expand the Tables and then scroll down and find the DynamicOps.RepositoryModel.WorkflowDefinitions. This will actually show you all the workflow that are in the repository so be careful, you don’t want to mess up any of the internal workflows needed by vRA(vCAC). Execute the following SQL query to remove the unwanted revisions.
DELETE FROM [DBNAME].[DynamicOps.RepositoryModel].[WorkflowDefinitions] WHERE Name = ‘WFStubBuildingMachine’ AND Revision != ‘0’
Replace DBNAME with the name of your Database and you can replace WFStubBuildingMachine with the stub you want to work with. This will remove all but the original blank stub.
5. Once you have completed that you can go to your Design Center and see that all revisions except revision 0 have been removed or you can issue the following command:
cloudutil.exe Workflow-List
6. Now you can either open the saved workflow from the Design Center and send it to the repository or issue the following command to do so:
cloudutil.exe Workflow-Update -f c:\myworkflow.xaml -d “Updated version to run Custom vCenter Folders” -n WFStubBuildingMachine
That’s it, that is all there is to it. Now your Design Center will be clean and uncluttered.