Cloud Blogger - Blog around VMware Aria Automation & Orchestrator (vRO & vRA)

A basic VCF Automation cloud template has one machine and one network resource. Every VM it builds gets exactly one NIC, and whether that NIC gets DHCP or a static IP is decided by the network profile behind it, not by the person making the request. A recent request asked for much more control: up to three NICs per VM, each one static or DHCP as the requester chooses, any num...

More and more products now offer a GraphQL API next to (or instead of) REST: GitHub, GitLab, Shopify, ServiceNow’s GraphQL framework, many monitoring tools, and plenty of in-house platforms. Orchestrator has no GraphQL plugin, but it doesn’t need one. A GraphQL call is just an HTTP POST with a JSON body, so the built-in HTTP-REST scripting objects can do it. In this post I’ll...

After upgrading to VCF Operations Orchestrator 9.1.1, JavaScript actions that run OS-level commands through Java classes stop working. If you have old code that calls java.lang.Runtime.exec() to run a shell command, it will now fail. In this post I’ll show what the error looks like, why it happens, and how to run the same commands, including curl API calls, from a Python acti...

A quick note on the AI: I use Claude throughout this post, so wherever you read “Claude”, read “your AI assistant”. vcf-orchestrator-mcp is a standard MCP server, so it works with any AI tool that supports MCP, such as Claude Desktop, VS Code with GitHub Copilot or Cursor. Pick whichever you like.

For a while now I’ve been us...