Few days ago a customer asked me “Jose, can we do request of virtual machines via rest API?“. I said, yeah!!! but just for curiosity I asked why?

For a customer that has vRA 8 self service portal, brand new and all the fancy icons, day 2 operations and a bunch of features? Why would him/her asking about API 🙂 That really got me thinking and here I am about a new blog post for you my dear readers.

There use case was pretty simple to be honest. They have a bunch of Developers that create and destroy 1000+ virtual machines per day, hence clicking here and there on vRA 8 indeed could be a painful exercise or raise frustrations internally.

So to keep short, hereby the steps you will need to proceed for such demand.

1 – You need to be able to authenticate into vRA 8 platform and obtain a “Bearer Token“. Follow the link and you will see how! Thanks to @vandegaerm for his previous blog post.

2 – After you have obtained the Bearer Token, you need to know HOW TO FIND the API to use during your request. In that case, I always keep in mind two of my favorites URL:

• Swagger : https://your-vra8-environment/automation-ui/api-docs
• vRealize Automation API programming Guide: https://vdc-download.vmware.com/vmwb-repository/dcr-public/4e3fc812-7817-4ad3-92af-766007499000/57daec73-115a-4e1b-ae43-9b2ced09dc9f/Programming-Guide.pdf

3- In my case, I just created a simple structure in my postman ( if you want, just use curl commands too, it’s just the same).

4- To Start with: I would like to discover the “id” for the catalog item that I would like to request.

• GET: https://your-vra8-environment/catalog/api/items

5 – Then, I would like to get the specifics of that cloud template, more precisely what are the inputs required, such as CPU & Memory

• GET: https://your-vra8-environment/catalog/api/items/81c45e92-ad0f-320a-b4f1-8db41c39cedc

6 – Request the virtual machine with the necessary inputs

• POST : https://your-vra8-environment/catalog/api/items/81c45e92-ad0f-320a-b4f1-8db41c39cedc/request

And here it is!!! Ready to go and can be easily repeatable task for our developers!

Just remember to have an Unique Deployment Names + to delete previous deployments 🙂

You just need the Deployment ID for deletion

• DELETE: https://your-vra8-environment/deployment/api/deployments/2b33fa62-15a1-4677-88f4-09fc790f61e7

That’s it for today and I hope you have enjoyed How to Request VMs via API in vRealize Automation 8.

See you at next blog and Thanks for reading,

Regards, Jose Cavalheri

• vRA