Provisioning Virtual Machines with PowervRA

This post will walk through using PowervRA to provision virtual machines from vRA catalog items. PowervRA is a powerful tool allowing us to automate and customise vRA configuration and deployments by leveraging the RESTFUL API. We’ll cover requesting catalog items using both the default settings and with additional values or customisation using a JSON file. For more information review the PowervRA documentation here, the full syntax for Request-vRACatalogItem can be found here.

PowervRA can be installed direct from the PowerShell gallery.

Install-Module -Name PowervRA

Alternatively you can download from GitHub here, drop the PowervRA folder into C:\Program Files\WindowsPowerShell\Modules, and then import.

Import-Module PowervRA

Use Connect-vRAServer to establish a connection to the vRA appliance. This will prompt for a username and password.

Connect-vRAServer -Server <vRA Server> -Tenant <Tenant Name>
Connect-vRAServer -Server vralab01.corp.local -Tenant esxsi -IgnoreCertRequirements

You can also add the -Username switch and -Password switch, or -Credential to add a Powershell credential file. If you are using self signed certs add -IgnoreCertRequirements.

Use Get-vRACatalogItems to list all catalog items the user has access to. Add the -Name switch to list details for a specific catalog item. Make a note of the Id, this is required to request the catalog item.

Get-vRACatalogItem
Get-vRACatalogItem -Name <Catalog Item Name>
Get-vRACatalogItem -Name PSTestBlueprint

Use Request-vRACatalogItem to make the request, you can also add -Wait to wait for the request to complete, and -Verbose to show the event log.

Request-vRACatalogItem -Id <Catalog Item Id>
Request-vRACatalogItem -Id 78eddfcc-c9dd-4104-abd6-218b6ff1e9fa -Wait -Verbose 

We can even do something like:

$CatalogItemId = (Get-vRACatalogItem -Name PSTestBlueprint).Id
Request-vRACatalogItem -Id $CatalogItemId

In this scenario we want to go further and add values for some custom properties to the request. The request can be customised using a JSON file.

Output the catalog item properties to a JSON file for customisation.

Get-vRACatalogItemRequestTemplate -Name <Catalog Item Name> | Out-File path\file.json
Get-vRACatalogItemRequestTemplate -Name PSBlueprintTest | Out-File C:\requestTemplate.json

Set $json as the updated JSON file. You can verify this has worked and the contents of the JSON file using Write-Output.

$json = Get-Content path\file.json -Raw
$json = Get-Content C:\requestTemplate.json -Raw
Write-Output $json

Update and save the JSON file as required, for example adding the value for a custom property, or amending the CPU / memory allocation.

We can now request the catalog item using the JSON file.

Request-vRACatalogItem -JSON $json

When the request is submitted either monitor through Powershell, if you used the verbose switch, or follow the status in the vRA portal as normal under the requests tab.