Adding Notes to your VM in VCF Automation

In our last blog we discussed a Post-Deployment Action in VCF Automation that creates a Snapshot of the VM once it's deployed, which we implemented via a VCFA Subscription and Orchestrator Workflow. In this blog we will use a similar methodology to add Notes to VMs built with VCFA. Let's go!

Too often I see VMs in vCenter that look like this.

Powered off, no Notes, no idea who owns it, etc. I'd like all VMs to at least have some text in the Notes tile. We can force this at build time in our VCFA Blueprint and run an Orchestrator Workflow via Subscriptions which will put those Notes entered by the requester into the VM in the Notes tile. Here's how.

In my Blueprint I've requested input from the user called "notes" and used it as a VM Property later in the code.

Requesting a VM from Service Broker Catalog looks like this, notice the VM Notes text box allowing users to put whatever they want in here. I've skinned the Blueprint with a Custom Form to provide a bit more flexibility.

You'll notice Notes is now a Custom Property on the VCFA Deployment.

We now need an Orchestrator Workflow that will take that Custom Property and attach it to the VM once it's been provisioned. Mine looks like this.

It takes inputProperties and outputs the vCenter VM. The Scripting looks like this.

The Second Scriptable Task looks like this, taking the vCenter VM and inputProperties as inputs.

The scripting looks like this.

My Subscription, which runs this Workflow once a Compute Post Provision event is received looks like this.

With all of this in place, the VM I requested at the beginning of this blog looks like this in vCenter.

So much more useful! Another powerful use case for Workflows and Subscriptions in VCFA, hope this was helpful.