Introducing PowervRA

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

Requirements

• PowerShell 4 - Not tested with PowerShell 5, however we don’t foresee any issues.
• vRealize Automation 7.0 - Some functions may work with vRA 6.2, but this has not been tested.

Download

If you have PowerShell 5 installed, you can grab the module from the PowerShell Galleryby running the following command:

Install-Module -NamePowervRA

If not, you can grab the latest release straight form the GitHub repository with this handy one liner:

(new-object Net.WebClient).DownloadString("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jakkulabs/PowervRA/master/Get-PowervRA.ps1") | iex

Documentation

You can view help for any cmdlet from the PowerShell console with the Get-Help command:

Get-Help -Name Get-vRAService

Alternatively, you can head over to our Read the Docs site, where you will find documentation for each cmdlet in the current release.

Connecting to vRA

Before you get going you will need to connect to an instance of vRA. If you are using self signed certificates, ensure that you usethe IgnoreCertRequirements switch.

Connect-vRAServer -Server vra01.company.local -Tenant Tenant01 -Credential (Get-Credential) -IgnoreCertRequirements

If successfulthe cmdlet will return information about your connection.

You can view this information at anytimeby calling the global variable vRAConnection:

$GLOBAL:vRAConnection

Example use case:Viewing the status of vRA system services

So lets say that you want to quickly check that all of the core vRA services are up and running or maybe even get a notification if a service goes down. You can do this with Get-vRAApplianceServiceStatus.

To list each service and it’s current status run the following:

Get-vRAApplianceServiceStatus | Select-Object Name, Status

Searching for failed services

To return service that may have failed to register, you can use Where-Object and query for status’ that are not equal to REGISTERED. This could easily be incorporated in to amonitoring script and used to check the health of your vRA instance.

Get-vRAApplianceServiceStatus | Where-Object {$_.Status -ne "REGISTERED"}

In the example above the iaas-service has failed. We can take a closer look at what is actually going on by examining the ErrorMessage property:

$Service = Get-vRAApplianceServiceStatus -Name iaas-service
$Service.ErrorMessage