Add modules/support for vRealize

[liamwh]

SUMMARY

Create modules to deploy and configure vRealize Operations Manager using Ansible.

Primarily to idempotently configure:

• All config found under: https://vropsaddress.whatever/ui/index.action#/administration (Access Control, Authentication Sources, Cloud Accounts, Other Accounts, Management Packs, Policies, Certificates, Log Forwarding, Outbound Settings, etc. etc.)
• Configure Alerting (Alert Definitions, Symptom Definitions, etc)
• Configure Environment:

Would be nice:

• Configure Dashboards

ISSUE TYPE

• Feature Idea

COMPONENT NAME

vRealize Operations Manager modules, probably scraped from the vROps API.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Automated deployment/configuration of vRealize Operations Manager and it's integration with vCenter. Contributes towards completion of Ansible Modules for the VMware vRealize suite.

None exist yet for vROps. It is typically configured via the UI (but has API support).

[goneri]

We auto-generate these modules from the API documentation (Swagger 2.0 files). The files are available in the /etc/vmware-vapi/apiexplorer/json directory on the vcenter. Can you please check to see if you've got some additional files related to vRealize there?

[mariolenz]

@goneri I'm not sure if you really know vROps but it's a product that I don't consider directly a part of vSphere. For me, vSphere is the core virtualization solution from VMware and vROps is an add-on monitoring solution. It's closely related to and often marketed together with vSphere, though.

I agree with @liamwh that it would be great to have ansible modules for vROps, but I'm not sure if they should be part of this collection. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to say that they shouldn't, either. I'm just not sure about the scope of this collection.

That said, I'm quite sure vROps at least had a Swagger API definition in the past. I'm still searching for one for the more recent versions.

[mariolenz]

Using the API with vRealize Operations Manager:

Swagger based API documentation is available with the product, with the capability of making REST API calls right from the landing page.

To access the API documentation, use the URL of your vRealize Operations Manager instance. For example, if the URL of your instance is https://vrealize.example.com, the API reference is available from: https://vrealize.example.com/suite-api/doc/swagger-ui.html

[goneri]

Hi @mariolenz, indeed I've never used vRealize. We can certainly prepare a new collection, but first we need to see if https://github.com/ansible-collections/vmware_rest_code_generator/ is able to generate the modules.

[liamwh]

Thanks @mariolenz and @goneri! Do we already know if the code generator was successful against the vROPs API?