The missing prepare_vra_template

Ladies and Gentlemen following me and my blog, let me say that last week was one of those great weeks here at VMware! They say things coming in 3s well last week that is so very true for me.

1. I am now a member of the CTO Ambassador program which brings me closer to my personal goals to become a field CTO some day!
2. I found out that my membership for vExpert was extended so thanks to all of you who continue to keep following me and this blog.
3. Finally and the part I feel is the coolest, I will be getting some of my own developed scripts integrated into an upcoming release of vRA.

So now you might be asking… but Gary you’re an automation guy, what could you have possibly created that could be included? Well what if you had an automated script to deploy the agents needed for Software Components in vRA 7? Don’t we already have a prepare_vra_template available? Didn’t you just post an automated way to use that at provisioning time?

Well yes we have the prepare_vra_template.sh and yes I did just post how to utilize that with the event broker. That said when was the last time you ran a shell script on windows? (Yes I know there’s cygwin and other utilities but it’s not the same) Enter my contribution to you my followers, to my customers, to my peers, and most importantly to the vRA product. I have created a prepare_vra_template.ps1 that will automate all of the steps needed for Application Authoring on Windows provisioning for vRA 7.

So what exactly does it do? If you review the link below, the script walks through every one of those step to prepare your Windows VM for application authoring.

http://pubs.vmware.com/vra-70/topic/com.vmware.vrealize.automation.doc/GUID-3EBC2C8E-3BD1-43CA-8057-052C3F00308A.html

While developing this I felt it required flexibility based on how you might want to execute the script. Using this mentality I have made sure that it can but utilized in one of three ways:

1. Command line (ex. ./prepare_vra_template.ps1 applianceName iaasName password ) this is actually the methodology you will see me use in my next post which automates the deployment of the agent from vRA
2. User configuration (ex. edit the 3 variables in the user config portion of the script)
3. Manual interaction (ex. the script if the values aren’t set by either of the two options above will prompt you for the 3 variables)

While the script may not be 100% bullet proof yet and may still have some gaps (only supports Windows 2012 R2 today), it still is a start that will make all of our lives easier.

If you would like to see a video walk through of the script

Download the script from here or here

UPDATED FOR 7.0.1 please use this link to download

Now I’ll walk through the script a bit so you understand the different pieces I included.

First block of code accepts the parameters in case they are passed via commandline

    param(
      [string]$vRAurl="",
      [string]$IaaS="",
      [string]$Password=""
    )

Second block of code worth note is the user configuration. Notice all of these settings are commented out with the # but you can hard code these if you would like to your particular settings.

# ----------------------------------------
#   USER CONFIGURATION - EDIT AS NEEDED
# ----------------------------------------

# If this is unattended then these will be set by the parameters
# Otherwise you can preset these for run time or simply answer the prompts

# $vRAurl = "virtualAppliance.FQDN"
# $IaaS = "windowsIaaS.FQDN"
# $Password = "Password"

# incomplete this section will build what the script prompts for later

# ----------------------------------------
# 		END OF USER CONFIGURATION
# ----------------------------------------

If neither of these are set you will get the following prompts