Welcome to part 1 of my series on Automating Tintri with vRealize Orchestrator.
I’m sure almost everyone visiting my blog knows how awesome Tintri is so I’m not going to go into details of the product. In short, I love it because it’s simple and clones VMs incredibly fast.
The other hidden gem about Tintri is that there very well documented REST API allowing us to do all sorts of nice automation without having to click through the GUI. Recently Tintri announced Sync VM which got me really excited. I love all things DevOps, and when I was talking with Adam Cavaliere and other SQL server Engineers, they immediately saw amazing potential for this. After speaking with a few of my customers who had vRealize Automation, they really loved the idea of being able to have Day 2 Operations for tasks like Snapshotting their VM, and were even more excited about Sync VM and how that could be used.
So after further discussion, we decided to build a vRealize Orchestrator Package including actions, workflows, and all awesome stuff for using Tintri. In this series I’m going to walk you through how I built the package, and how you can use it.
The following workflows are included:
• Tintri-CreateSession – Creates a REST Session with your Tintri VMstore. This is needed for all subsequent workflows.
• Tintri-GetUUIDfromVM – Allows you to select a Virtual Machine from vRO, and will return the corresponding Tintri UUID. This is needed to perform any actions against Tintri objects.
• Tintri-SnapshotVM – Utilizes the 2 workflows above, and then creates a Tintri Snapshot of your VM.
• Tintri-SyncVM – Magical! Takes a Source VM and TargetVM, then syncs the VMDKs underneath. Tintri does all the heavy lifting. Check out a great video on this technology at https://www.tintri.com/blog/2015/05/tech-tuesday-manage-data-syncvm-video.
• Tintri-ReplicateVM – Also magical! Enable Tintri replication on a VM for DR purposes.
As I release the workflows throughout the series, you will be able to find them on Flowgrab via the SystemsGame Page. If you aren’t already familiar with FlowGrab, I highly recommend you check it out. It’s a great place for sharing workflows with the vRealize Orchestrator community.
Finally, a big thank you to Adam Cavaliere for coming up with these cool ideas and working out all the kinks for the REST API calls in Python first. If you want an expert on Tintri, definitely contact him!