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Automate your Zerto Disaster Recovery solution with vCO

Today I show you how to automate your Zerto installation with the vCO. Or those which are not familiar with Zerto here a quote from the Zerto Website:

What is Zerto?

Zerto provides enterprise-class business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) solutions for virtualized infrastructure and cloud. [……]  Zerto Virtual Replication, is the industry’s first hypervisor-based replication solution for tier-one applications. Zerto Disaster Recovery solutions replace traditional array-based BCDR that was not built to deal with virtual environments.”

So for those which know the VMware Site Recovery Manager, Zerto is an alternative Product to the SRM.

For a customer Self Provisoning Portal I had to  automate the deployment of the virtual Machines within the Disaster Recovery Solution.  In my case this Automation must be archived with the VMware Orchestrator.

Zerto offers a limited documentation of the API which can be accessed with a REST API. The documentation can be found here: http://downloads.zerto.com/documentation_4acccec86a1e7cbf77f8e6bd3831c31c/3.1/Zerto%20Virtual%20Replication%20REST%20APIs%20Online%20Help/index.html

With this documentation I started my integration.

First thing what we need to do to integrate Zerto is to add the Zerto Hosts as REST Clients in the vCO Server. This integration is done over a vCO Workflow.

If have documented this before in another post (http://www.vcoportal.de/2014/02/automating-veeam-with-vco-and-the-restful-api/) so I will only point to the parameter which are needed.

For the configuration, you give a name, have to provide the URL to the ZVM Machine with the configured Port (the default port is 9669) and a Connection and Operation timeout. Please use for the connection a HTTPS connection. HTTP is possible but I had a lot of problems that the vCO run into timeouts.

We do not need a proxy Server.

As Authentication we use the “Basic” Authentication Type.

I used a “Shared Session” for the configuration but Single Sessions are also possible.

When you “Submit” the Workflow you will get a Certificate error.

Install the Certificate and go ahead.

After we have connected your Zerto REST Connection, we have to create our API connection. The initial request we must made is to make a call to the API. This call is done with a username and password for permissions to the vCenter Server. Here it is important, that the Username and the Password are for a User with permissions vCenter Server. The Zerto REST connection response includes an “x-zerto-session” header. The String in this Header is used for any future communication with the ZVM (Zerto Virtual Manager) and the vCenter Server. All other ways doesn’t function!


First thing we have to do is to create the initial request. For the request this URL is used: “https://zvm_ip:port/v1/“. I place this initial request in an own workflow. For the workflow we need some Attributes, Input and Output Variables.

Variable Name Type Value
Attribute sessionMode String Shared Session
Attribute RestAuthType String Basic
Inputs RestHost REST:RESTHost
Inputs authUserName String
Inputs authPassword SecureString
Output xZertoSessionKey String

In the Workflow we create a Script Element.

In this scripting element we include all Attributes and Inputs as Input and the Output element as Output for the Workflow.

Then we create our Script:


// we must use "dedicated" User Credentials. With the Provided Credentials we need Access to the VC!

var authParams = [sessionMode, authUserName, authPassword];

var authenticationObject = RESTAuthenticationManager.createAuthentication(RestAuthType, authParams);

// Create the Host Authentication

RestHost.authentication = authenticationObject;

//Create the Session

var CreateSession = RestHost.createRequest("POST", "/v1/session/Add", null).execute();

// Place the Response in a separate Variable to Access the Content

var SessionResponse = new Properties();

SessionResponse.put("statusCode", CreateSession.statusCode);

SessionResponse.put("headers", CreateSession.getAllHeaders());

if ( SessionResponse.statusCode == "200") {

System.log("Session successful created")

xZertoSessionKey = SessionResponse.headers.get("x-zerto-session")

}

else {

System.log("Session could not be established")

}

With this small script we establish our connection to the ZVM and extract the x-zerto-session key.

Know we create the next workflow. In my case the next Workflow I use the command “get peersites” to access the connections between both locations.  The command to do this is: “https://zvm_ip:port/v1/peersites” .  Also for this workflow we need some Inputs and Outputs.

Variable Name Type Value
Inputs RestHost REST:RESTHost
Inputs xZertoSessionKey String
Output getPeersitesOutput String

Also here we create a scripting element within the workflow.

We use the created Input as Inputs and the Output as output with the Scriptable Task.  This Script is used with the workflow:

 


//Authenticate the request with the Zerto x-session-header
var CreateSession = RestHost.createRequest("GET", "/v1/peersites", null)

// Build up the Session Header information

CreateSession.setHeader("x-zerto-session", xZertoSessionKey);

// The Output of the Command is catch in a variable

getPeersitesOutput = CreateSession.execute();

System.log ("ContentString " + getPeersitesOutput.contentAsString);

As last point we have to build up a third Workflow witch put both before created workflow together.

The Input and Outputs are created from the need within the Workflow created before.

Variable Name Type Value
Attribute xZertoSessionKey String
Attribute getPeersitesOutput String
Inputs RestHost REST:RESTHost
Inputs authUserName String
Inputs authPassword SecureString
Output xZertoSessionKey String

After you have finished everything you can execute the Workflow and see the Output of the command.

There are many more commands witch you can use to automate your Zerto installation. All commands are documented in the API Documents to which I pointed before.

So have fun and orchestrate the World 😉

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SRM and the planned migrations…..

Be aware, this post has nothing to do with Automation or Orchestration. This post is only related to the VMware Site Recovery Manager and a solution for a Problem during a planned migration. Maybe the post is useful for someone else which encounters the same problems…..

Last weekend I supported a customer witch had to power down one of his both datacenter. For this, we had to migrate the virtual Machines from one DC in the other. At the end all machines must be migrated back. From my site a view, this should be an easy thing because the customer had an SRM implementation. The storage is served via an IBM V7000 and the LUNs are replicated over both datacenter….. The customer had built the recovery Plans and tested them before the Migration should occur…

So from my point of view I expected an easy migration……

After everything was cleared the users were at home we started with a “Planned Migration” from the Datacenter 1 (DC1) to Datacenter 2 (DC2). This was quite easy and at the end we created our “Failback Plan” with the SRM.

No for us it was time to take a drink and wait for the Power and Air-conditions Guys to finish their jobs.

After a few hours it was time for us to migrate the VMs back to DC1…….

The customer created a recovery plan for his two different clusters. In the first cluster only the normal VMs were placed. In the second cluster the Database VMs were located…..

So we started the planned and the VMs out of the first Cluster fail back without any problems…..sincerely the VMs from the Database Cluster could be relocated……

We got the error:  No host with hardware version ‘9’ and datastore ‘snap-ef732565ae’ which are powered on and not in maintenance mode are available….

So we checked the vSphere client…..the Hosts were online (Host Version 5.5) and the Datastore with the name ‘snap-ef732565ae’ was also present…..

Really strange……a quick search in the Web leads to this VMware Documentation (http://pubs.vmware.com/srm-55/index.jsp#com.vmware.srm.admin.doc/GUID-FE6A85EC-B44E-415A-9C5F-1E17BC846119.html) were the problem was described with the solution to wait 15 Minutes for the next try because the SRM had cached some old information. So we took a coffee break  and after 20 Minutes we started the next try……unfortunately we had the same problems……

I tried to figure out the problem in the logs but I could found anything what pointed to the error…..

So we tried a lot of things to finish our “Planned Migration”…..every try needed a lot of time……one of the last things we did was to restart all ESX Hosts of the DB Cluster…..after all Hosts were Online we did the next try and “voila” I worked……

In the last week I did a lot of research about this behavior.  I figured out that I could reproduce the error when I power-up the ESXi Server quickly without any delay.  So from my point of view it seems to be a “communication” problem between the ESX Hosts of a cluster.

 

So if anyone has the same problem….try a reboot of the ESX Hosts……

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Wavemaker and vCO – The next level

Remember these?

http://www.vcoportal.de/2011/11/using-wavemaker-as-web-frontend-for-vco/
http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2011/12/leveraging-vcd-vco-wavemaker-part-1.html
http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2011/12/leveraging-vcd-vco-wavemaker-part-2.html
http://mighty-virtualization.blogspot.de/2011/11/vco-wavemaker-your-cloud-webservice.html
http://mighty-virtualization.blogspot.de/2011/11/vco-wavemaker-your-cloud-webservice_24.html

Well, it has been quite a while since then, and a lot happened to Wavemaker in between:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSn7WhX5Wc0 

This week VMware released a new Fling: “Wavemaker Integration with vCenter Orchestrator”

https://labs.vmware.com/flings/wavemaker-integration-for-vcenter-orchestrator

This fling allows you to:

  • Run the included WaveOperator demo project, that provides common tasks (like start and monitor workflow execution), comparable to the weboperator webview in vCO
  • Use the widgets to create your own web interface for your workflows
  • Use the Java Services that expose the vCO API into Wavemaker projects

Sounds cool? Is cool! No more manual getting things together, but predefined wavemaker widgets for your workflows to just drag and drop into yourweb interface!

But wait, there’s more! The project is available open source on Github: https://github.com/vmware/wavemaker_integration

So you can even expand the functionality to your needs, or adopt the code for your projects.

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vCO Input Presentation

Last week I received a customer question regarding a vCO input presentation. The customer has a vCO Server were multiple vCenter Servers are connected. For his environment, he created a workflow were users are asked to give some information. Based on this information the view should be restricted.

First thing the customer had, was a Variable from type VC:SDKConnection. This is used to choose the correct vCenter Server.

When you start a vCO Client with this, you can pick the right vCenter Server for your need.

The next thing what should be archived was the possibility, to pick an ESX Host from that vCenter Server. As I looked into the customer configuration I saw that there was a  created  “Select value as” and “Specify a root object to be shown…:”

With this config the view was not as the customer was expecting it. When the user came to the point to  choose an ESX Host, the users saw all ESX Server from the hosts.

This is really uncool…..

So how can we fix this behavior?

That’s pretty easy…..

Let’s go back to the Workflow. There we choose the Presentation pane and the input. Then we change the  “Specify a root object….”

Here we change the Value over the Pen (in this case) to #vCenterServer.

When we now save the workflow and start it again wen only see the Hosts / vCenter Server to which we limited the view.

Easy or?

One important note here: The limitation of the View works only with the “Select value as” tree. It doesn’t work for the other views!

So have fun and orchestrate the World!

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Must read for all vCO workflow developers

“Lessons in Software Reliability” is an article recently published on www.javacodegeeks.com. It gives some very valid and valuable tips for “What does it take to build reliable and stable enterprise software?”.

The content not only applies to to software development, but also to workflow development in vCO. You do want your workflow to be reliable, aren’t you?

Here’s the link: http://www.javacodegeeks.com/2011/06/lessons-in-software-reliability.html