Since the initial release of PowervRA I’ve been busy hacking away at bug fixes, improvements and new features. One that we were keen to get out of the door was support for reservations. The reservation-service API is a mammoth and even though I’d had a fair battles with it in the past, I underestimated the challenges involved in getting support in to the module.

I’m pleased to announce though that version 1.1.0 introduces support for managing vSphere and vCloud Air reservations. Here’s how to get started:

vRO plugin development is something I’ve wanted to get in to for ages. Mainly because I wanted an excuse to do some more learning around JAVA and also because it’s an area of the product that I know little about. The main issue with getting the ball rolling with this was the serious lack of information relating to developing plugins for vRO 6.x and from what I’ve noticed quite a lot has changed since version 5.5.

Over the next few posts I’m hoping to share what I’ve learnt so far. Hopefully it will give someone a head start. It would also be cool to hear from anyone who has done more miles with this than me.. Have I misunderstood a concept? Or missed something important out? Let me know.

• Getting started with vRO plugin development - Part 1 - You are here!
• Getting started with vRO plugin development - Part 2

This morning I noticed a conversation on twitter that pointed to the following communities post: https://communities.vmware.com/thread/533417

It reminded me that I had to do the same a while back. The requirement was to interrogate the hosts and send an email to the requester with cdp information in the body of the message and also as a html attachment.

Here is a quick tip that will show you how to quickly troubleshoot a failed request in vRA.

Connect to your vRA instance:

Connect-vRAServer -Server vra.corp.local -Tenant Tenant01 -Credential (Get-Credential) -IgnoreCertRequirements

Now find the failed request:

Get-vRAConsumerRequest | Where-Object {$_.StateName -eq "Failed"} | Select RequestNumber, RequestedItemName, StateName | Sort-Object -Property RequestNumber

Then to determine the cause, take a look at the requestCompletion property of the request:

(Get-vRAConsumerRequest -RequestNumber 121).RequestCompletion | Format-List

requestCompletionState : FAILED
completionDetails : A server error was encountered Error requesting machine. Cannot find network profile WebServers..

Off the back of my previous post, I thought it would be a good idea to post a list of the links available from a virtual machine entity: