vCloud automation tools

Posted on August 21, 2019

In this blog I will take you on a small tour around some of the vCloud automation tools out there. Possibly these tools and or languages are already in use in your organization, making the adaptation of these tools rather easy.

One of the biggest challenges I faced using vCenter was to offer API access for end users in a multi-tenant environment.

At my previous company I worked around this issue by creating a multitude of RABC roles. However when the environment grew this was getting more and more challenging. A mistake for instance is easily made and this could have serious consequences security wise.

Therefore I felt the need for a more flexible infrastructure setup that was build with multi-tenancy in mind.

This is where vCloud comes in. vCloud is setup in such a way that each user (or Organization) gets his own tenant in which he or she can grant access rights. This ensures that access rights are only granted to one tenant and or organization.

For more information on tenant management I recommend you visit https://docs.vmware.com/en/vCloud-Director/10.0/com.vmware.vcloud.tenantportal.doc/GUID-74C9E10D-9197-43B0-B469-126FFBCB5121.html

Once you have created a user with the proper access rights you can start thinking about automating daily tasks.

Here are some of the examples I worked with and or read about:

Table of Contents

Powershell/PowerCLI

There are a lot of examples out there on how to use PowerCLI but I think this community forum is a great start:
https://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/automationtools/powercli/vcdpowercli/content

pyvcloud

pyvcloud is an open source Python SDK for vCloud Director. For more information, visit http://vmware.github.io/pyvcloud/.

vcd-cli

vcd-cli is a command line interface for vCloud Director. For more information, visit https://vmware.github.io/vcd-cli/.

vRealize Orchestrator Plug-in for vCloud Director

You can use the vRealize Orchestrator plug-in to run workflows that automate vCloud Director processes. For more information, visit Using the vRealize Orchestrator plugin for vCloud.

In a next post I will do a deeper dive into a couple of these vCloud automation tools. I will also share some examples of scripts for automating for instance vApp deployments.

Check our other vCloud Director related articles here

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