Property Toolkit

The SovLabs Property Toolkit for vRealize Automation enables customers to achieve greater levels of efficiency and control through metadata management. Custom Properties are an essential feature of vRealize Automation, allowing customers to define operational, organizational, financial and application-related information on the blueprint or capture with a catalog request and store it on the VMs managed within vRealize Automation.

Custom properties are not just a popular feature of vRealize Automation. They are essential to capturing catalog request information and for extending vRealize Automation via workflow orchestration. However, until now, there was no simple method of managing custom properties on VMs after they have been provisioned. Additionally, using multiple inter-related properties to capture requester input can be tedious to setup and maintain across blueprints.

Now with the SovLabs Property Toolkit, vRealize Automation architects and admins can manage existing custom properties on VMs throughout their lifecycle. Additionally, they can create dynamic property sets or groups of properties. With dynamic property sets, each property within the set can derive its name and value based on the value of other vRA custom properties or any custom logic utilizing the SovLabs Template Engine.


Compatibility

VMware vRealize Automation (vRA) 7.2+
VMware vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) 7.x
EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud (EHC) 4.x

Highlights

  • Starting from 2018.3.1, OVF/OVA support for vRA 7.5
    • Native support for Naming, IPAM and DNS integrations for blueprints with OVF/OVA components via the SovLabs Property Toolkit module
  • Create Dynamic Property Sets for groups of properties with dynamic names and values
  • Ongoing Day2 management of custom properties on VMs managed by vRA
  • Bulk edit, update and delete custom properties on VMs managed by vRA
  • Define one or more vRA custom properties that represent Dynamic Property Sets
    • Each property value represents a Dynamic Property Set
  • Property Set capabilities
    • JSON-formatted or comma-separated list
    • Multiple vRealize Automation custom properties can be defined in a Dynamic Property Set
    • Ability to specify attributes for each property including name, value, hidden, encrypted, readonly, and runtime
    • Customize attributes of each property using the SovLabs Template Engine
  • Delivers dozens to thousands of automation scenarios with minimal overhead via dynamic template configurations and vRA property injection, avoiding Blueprint sprawl

Known Behavior

  1. If the property name or value resolves to an empty string, it will be skipped

Quick Start Process

  1. Define one or more Property Sets on vRA blueprint
  2. Provision!