vCO workflow parameters to request a vRA Catalog Item

OK playing around tonight with vRealize Orchestrator day I wanted to use the workflow from the vRA Plugin to Request a Catalog Item in vRA. In my case it was a Blueprint to deploy an Ubuntu server.

Now as a prerequisite you have to run a few other workflows to initiate your instance of vRA but you can find a plethora of blogs showing how to do that.

When I executed “Request a catalog item” workflow it failed. It was looking for parameters and I made an educated guess that the parameters where the parameters displayed when you requested a catalog item from vRA like CPU, Memory Storage etc.

When I ran the workflow without paramters vRO didn’t error but the request in vRA did with an error ‘Entries’ should not be empty which gave me the clue what the parameters were. My next attempt I tried to mimic the Item properties like VirtualMachine.CPU.Count . This time when I ran the workflow vRO failed and the complaint was it didn’t like the parameters. What I hadn’t noticed at first was in the log vRO was telling what parameters it was expecting:

[2015-07-02 18:59:25.124] [I] Accepted inputs:

[2015-07-02 18:59:25.125] [I] – provider-Cafe.Shim.VirtualMachine.NumberOfInstances

[2015-07-02 18:59:25.125] [I] – provider-Cafe.Shim.VirtualMachine.TotalStorageSize

[2015-07-02 18:59:25.125] [I] – provider-VirtualMachine.CPU.Count

[2015-07-02 18:59:25.125] [I] – provider-VirtualMachine.LeaseDays

[2015-07-02 18:59:25.125] [I] – provider-VirtualMachine.Memory.Size

[2015-07-02 18:59:25.125] [I] – provider-blueprintId

[2015-07-02 18:59:25.125] [I] – provider-provisioningGroupId

Of course after I added the CPU, Memory and Storage parameters (as above) while running the workflow it all worked 🙂