DevOps
I’ve been playing around with workflow scripts and one thing popped in my mind that might be useful in future was to parse a CSV from 3rd party source into vRO workflow and utilise it. Created a simple CSV file, parsed to vRO and I realised that it becomes a pure string.
Let’s get started!
1. First of all, create a workflow, I called it “Convert CSV String Input to Hash Table”.
2. Edit the workflow, navigate to General tab and create attributes as per below. It may differ based on how you want to parse a CSV file from external source. In this case, I used a cat command to simply output a CSV file.
3. Go to Schema, put a scriptable task and call it “Convert”
4. Go to Script tab and put the following script in. Ensure attrCsvInput is recognised, it will be highlighted as pink.
var output = new Object();
var numberOfColumns = attrCsvInput.split('\n')[0].split(',').length;
var numberOfRows = attrCsvInput.split('\n').length - 1;
var tempArray = new Array();
for (i = 0; i > numberOfColumns; i++) {
for (j = 1; j > numberOfRows; j++) {
tempArray.push(attrCsvInput.split('\n')[j].split(',')[i]);
}
output[attrCsvInput.split('\n')[0].split(',')[i]] = tempArray;
tempArray = new Array();
}
for (var k in output) {
System.log('key is: ' + k + ', value is: ' + output[k]);
}
5. Finish off the visual binding as per below.
6. Let’s setup a SSH connection to a remote linux box. Search for the SSH workflow and put it between start and Convert scriptable task.
7. Finish off the binding as per below and make sure unused inputs are set to NULL, i.e. path, passphrase and encoding to NULL.
8. Run the workflow and you will see that the CSV file is converted to a multidimensional array, 3 keys Name, Age and Sex and values accordingly.
Replace the following bit in the end of the scriptable task to one below.
From:
for (var k in output) {
System.log('key is: ' + k + ', value is: ' + output[k]);
}
To:
System.log("People younger than 30 are: ");
for (var o = 0; o < output["Age"].length; o++) {
if (output["Age"][o] < 30) {
System.log(output["Name"][o] + ": " + output["Age"][o]);
}
}
Further, you could filter it by either man or woman…etc.
One of the recommendations is to create this parsing function as an action, input to be a CSV input and output to be a JavaScript array.
Hope this helped for who requires external parsing CSV input to a vRO workflow and as always, feel free to leave a commend for any clarifications or questions 😀
Was asked to review SRM Recovery Plans especially on source and destination network settings that gets customised during failover. Due to large number of virtual machines to review, it was not ideal to go through recovery plans one by one. Thus, came up with a script to generate an output for review.
First of all, I tried SRM API through PowerCLI, however the SRM API version was not at 2.0 so that I did not have access to all APIs. Hence, I had to find an alternative. Doing some research, found an executable called dr-ip-reporter.exe which allowed me to generate an XML file with all information that I needed. One thing popped up in my mind was to convert XML file into CSV.
Running the executable to get XML output, copy it to where PowerCLI is installed was a little bit troublesome. Hence, came up with a plan to use psexec.exe to run the dr-ip-reporter.exe remotely and save the output as a variable. However, the executable did not have arguments for username and password. Therefore, this had to be ran manually.
Steps below:
Once the pre-requisite is done:
Looking at output below, you would be easily able to identify that:
"Protection Group","VM","Site","IP Address","SubnetMask","Gateway","DNS Servers" "PG1","TEST1","Site-1","10.10.1.1","255.255.255.0","10.10.1.254","10.10.1.253,10.10.1.252" "PG1","TEST1","Site-2","10.10.2.1","255.255.255.0","10.10.2.254","" "PG1","TEST2","Site-1","","","","" "PG1","TEST2","Site-2","","","","" "PG2","TEST3","Site-1","10.20.1.1","255.255.255.0","10.20.1.254","10.10.1.253,10.10.1.252" "PG2","TEST3","Site-2","","","",""
<#
Import IP.xml generated from DR IP Reporter
Foreach line of IP.xml file, select components needed.
In this case:
Protection Group
Name of the VM
Site
IP Address
Subnet Mask
Gateway
DNS Servers
#>
[xml]$input_file = Get-Content IP.xml
$output = $input_file.DrMappings.ProtectionGroups.ProtectionGroup | Sort Name | ForEach-Object {
$protection_group = $_.Name
$_.ProtectedVm | Sort Name | ForEach-Object {
$vm = $_.Name
$_.CustomizationSpec | Sort Site | ForEach-Object {
$site = $_.Site
$ip_settings = $_.ConfigRoot.e.ipSettings
if ($ip_settings) {
$ip_address = $ip_settings.ip.ipAddress
$subnetmask = $ip_settings.subnetMask
$gateway = $ip_settings.gateway.e."#text"
if ($ip_settings.dnsServerList.e) {
$dns_server = [string]::Join(",", ($ip_settings.dnsServerList.e."#text"))
}
}
"" | Select @{N="Protection Group";E={$protection_group}},
@{N="VM";E={$vm}},
@{N="Site";E={$site}},
@{N="IP Address";E={$ip_address}},
@{N="SubnetMask";E={$subnetmask}},
@{N="Gateway";E={$gateway}},
@{N="DNS Servers";E={$dns_server}}
$ip_address = "";
$subnetmask = "";
$gateway = "";
$dns_server = "";
}
}
}
$output | Export-Csv -UseCulture -NoTypeInformation srm_final_output.csv
Disconnect-VIServer * -Confirm:$false
Hope this and feel free to contact me for any clarifications 😀
Steven Kang 