In this section I’m going to walk through utilizing the workflow I created to initiate a Tintri Snapshot on your Virtual Machine.

Pre Requisites:

1. Completed Part 3 verifying that you can get a Tintri UUID from a virtual machine.
2. Have a Virtual Machine in vCenter which is running on the Tintri VM Store.
3. Import the latest Tintri Workflow Package I created and uploaded to FlowGrab.

The Tintri Snapshot

It would take far too long to go into all the details of snapshots and how they work, so instead I’m going to refer you to this PDF from Tintri. This gives a detailed overview.

However, to be a little more clear, the workflow we are executing here is going to complete the equivalent of selecting a VM in the Tintri GUI and selecting “Take snapshot…” as shown in the image below.

 

Note, that these snapshots will NOT appear in the vSphere client UI. This is expected.

If we want to view all the Tintri snapshots upon the VM, we can also select “View snapshots”, and the list will be displayed.

 

Executing the snapshots with vRO

So we have a great feature within Tintri, but we don’t really want to go to the Tintri UI every time. By having the vRO workflow, we can execute them directly from within vCenter or as a Day 2 action within vRealize Automation.

Step 1: Import the latest package from FlowGrab

After importing the package you should see some additional vRO workflows and actions.

As you can see there are 2 SnapVM workflows. The “FG-Tintri-SnapVM” workflow just encapsulates the action “tintriSnapVMfromUUID”. The 2nd workflow “FG-Tintri-GetUUIDandSnapVM” combines all the workflows from Parts 2 and 3 to create the REST session and get the Tintri UUID. As a general rule I try always create the “lego brick” workflow, and then create a larger workflow to wrap all the pieces I need. I include them both, as there may be creative workflows you want to create and need to do multiple snaps etc.

Step 2: Run the workflow

Run the vRO workflow and put in your REST Host, VM, and Snapshot name.

Check the logs to verify you received a successful snapshot creation.

The number that is returned at the end is actually the Snapshot UUID from Tintri. If you login to Tintri you should see your snapshot listed in the GUI.

In addition if you browse to “https://YourTintriIP/api/v310/vm” you will see this listed as the current latest snapshot for your virtual machine.

That’s it. You can now successfully Tintri snapshot your VMware Virtual Machines using vRO! At the end of the series I’ll be showing how to add these to vRealize Automation as Day 2 Actions.

What’s next…

Part 5: Automating Tintri Sync VM with vRO – Expected June 2nd