vRA 7: Event broker condition based on user-defined custom properties

One of the interesting enhancements of vRealize Automation 7 is the event broker. The event broker is responsible for starting vRealize Orchestrator workflows as part of a blueprint deployment, day 2 operations, configuration of blueprints, custom approvals and more. The event broker is the replacement of the workflow stubs feature, that was part of vRA 6.x (and still is in vRA 7) which allowed you to start a vRO workflow as part of a virtual machine deployment process.

The new event broker is far more flexible, and allows you to start different vRO workflows, synchronously or a-synchronously. You can set priorities and configure if a workflow is blocking or non-blocking. If you’re completely new to the event broker, you might want to read this article on virtualviking.net.

You can filter when a vRO workflow is started by using so called “conditions”. In this way you can configure a workflow to only run in the BuildingMachine phase, or you can link a certain workflow to a specific blueprint. It’s also possible to run a workflow based on the value of a (user defined) custom property. To achieve this, take the following steps:

1. Set and configure the custom property;
2. Set the “Extensibility.Lifecycle.Properties.VMPSMasterWorkflow32” property for the workflow name state you want to use in the event broker.
3. Configure a ${data~machine~properties~SomeCustomProperty} condition in the event broker.

Let’s have a closer look at these three steps.

Configure a custom property

This is a quite easy, just define the custom property you want to use and set it on the virtual machine you want to deploy (using a property group optionally). For example set custom property viktorious.os = “windows” for a virtual machine that’s running Windows :).

Pass custom properties to the event broker

By default the event broker can only work with a pre-defined payload. This payload doesn’t contain user-defined custom properties. Because of this you cannot filter on custom properties, because the custom properties are just not available in the event broker. However, by adding the special custom property Extensibility.Lifecycle.Properties.VMPSMasterWorkflow32.Buildingmachine = “*” to a virtual machine (or property group that’s linked to a virtual machine), you tell vRA it has to send custom properties to the event broker. The * is a wildcard, you can also configure Extensibility.Lifecycle.Properties.VMPSMasterWorkflow32.Buildingmachine = “viktorious.*”, which will only sent custom properties starting with viktorious to the event broker.

Note: Read more about the available extensibility custom properties here.

Configure the condition

The last step is to configure the condition in the event broker. In the event broker you can use the special filter option ${data~machine~properties~SomeCustomProperty}. For the custom property viktorious.os, the filter option would be  ${data~machine~properties~viktorious.os}. Now just set the exact condition, for example:

${data~machine~properties~viktorious.os} equals windows

This condition will only run the workflow, when the custom property viktorious.os is windows for a particular virtual machine that is deployed. In this way it’s possible to set conditions based on user-defined custom properties.