• I’d always wondered if you could retrieve snapshot information from a vCACVirtualMachine object. As it wasn’t immediately obvious from the API explorer I put the idea to bed and got on with other things. However, it turns out you can get this information but you need to get the VMEntity then look at the VMSnapshots link.

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  • In July 2015 I started work on vRAAPIClient. The idea behind the project was to give me a better insight in to how to drive vRA via it’s REST API. Ilearnt a lot about Python and about the application itself. However, work, life and other projects got in the way and as a result development stopped.

    This left me with an itch that needed scratching. I wanted to do more with the API and maybe this time move my focus to a different language like PowerShell.After a conversation with colleague Jonathan Medd, it turned out that we had a similar idea. A community based PowerShell toolkit for vRA. Out of this came PowervRA.

    For the first release,we have tried to focus on providing access to core functionality such as tenant, catalog and request management.The module currently contains 60 cmdlets and will keep growing as we add support for more features.

    Getting involved

    You can find the project on GitHub. If you have a cmdlet that you would like to add to a future release, fork the repo and create a pull request

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  • Sometimes you might need to programatically get information about resources provisioned by an IaaS request in vRA.

    This can easily be achieved by using the getResourcesProvisionedByRequest() method of vCACCAFECatalogConsumerRequestService.

    It will return a vCACCAFEPagedResource object on which you call getContent() to get at the underlying information. In this case it is an array of vCACCAFECatalogResource.

    Here is a quick example of how to use it..

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  • If you have a repository on GitHub and want to ensure that you always have a copy of the latest release here is a quick way to grab it (in zip format) with PowerShell.

    Job done ;-)

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  • Whilst working on a set of multi-node workflows I ended up with a run that was stuck in a loop of doom. For one reason or another it could not be cancelled via the GUI and it was beginning to have an effect on the overall performance of the server.

    On an off chance I decided to check out the new Control Center that was introduced in version 6.0.1 to see if it offered any clues on how to stop the erroneous run without effecting the other active users.

    I found exactly what I needed under Monitoring and Control\TroubleShooting.

    [read more]