Let’s say you want to test vRealize Automation Advanced Service Designer which allows you to create custom services that are based on Orchestrator, sending an email from the vRA catalog is a quick and easy solution to try it out.
The following steps will guide you to create a service that sends an email using the mail notification workflow in the embedded vRO.
Obviously you need to have a fully configured vRA environment including vRO (formerly vCO) , to demonstrate the email being sent and received I used FakeSMTP , which is a small Java application that acts as a mail server and displays incoming emails, pretty neat solution for demos check it out.
Let’s get to it, first lets configure the vRO workflow.
- log in to the vRO client
- In the “Design” pane under Library/Mail right click on the workflow named “Send notification” and click “Duplicate Workflow”
- Call the new workflow something like “Send Email” and place it in a folder of your choice, I created a “Cloud-Abstract” folder in my lab
- What we want to do now is hard code a few parameters such as SMTP host, SMTP port and credentials because we don’t want the system to prompt to the user for these details. Browse to the new workflow that you created and edit it
- In the “Inputs” tab click on the following Input parameters and click on “Move as attributes”: smtpHost, smtpPort, username, password
- Go back to the “General” tab and for each of the attributes input the value needed, if it’s irrelevant like in my environment I don’t need to supply credentials for FakeSMTP just leave it blank, next you will need to bind the attributes to the script element parameters, you can do that using edit or “Save and close” and fix the bindings in the next screen.
- After you click “Save and close” it will notify you that the valuidation is not successful, click “View details”
- For each of the parameters click “Bind parameter” and select the corresponding attribute
- let’s test that the workflow works, right click on the Workflow object and select “Start workflow”
- In the wizard click next until you get to the “Email content” page, in it input the detination and sender email addresses and the email content, You can also make the first pages go away by deleting them from the workflow presentation but I chose to leave them in incase I do need them in the future. (note, make sure FakeSMTP is running)
- Here is the result in “FakeSMTP” ofcourse you can use any SMTP client & server of your choice to demo this.
- Next we want to make this a service in vRealize Automation which I will call vRA from now on
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- Login to vRA using a “service Architect” and click on the “Advanced Services” tab
- Click on “Service Blueprint” and click on Add, in the vRO window find the service you created and click Next
- Make sure the name and description are right for you and if you dont like the information page presented when a user request a service (like I dont) then check the box to hide it
- Remove all the unneeded form fields, like I removed smtpHost etc and click “Next” and then “Add”
- Next highlight the new Service” and click “Publish”
- Last bit is to add it to an entitlement policy, I have one created already for the service category so all that is required is to add it to that service category under Administration/Catalog management/Catalog items highlight the service and select “Configure”, automatically anyone that is entitled to the category gets to access this new service. you can also add a nice icon for the final touch. Click Update
- And there it is, the new service is created in the catalog!
- Hit “Request” to test it and input required parameters
- In my FakeSMTP you can see that the email was sent/recieved and that a notification email for eh user was also sent from vRA itself
That is it! very simple and fast way to create any service using vRA’s Advance service designer and vRO