VMware vCAC Dynamic Property Dictionaries

 

Hello, Its been a long time since I have blogged about some thing, so I thought, I would make up for it with a small goodie. If you have used vCAC, I am sure you have used property dictionaries. Now for the un-initiated, property dictionaries in vCAC (version 5.1 – 6.0.1) have all a single purpose, in order to get an input from the user while requesting a machine.

This is by far one of the most helpful OOB (Out of Box features) for customizing the front end form. I wouldn’t take much time by explaining what this is – There have been enough blogs for that

Please read

http://www.virtualjad.com/2013/05/vcac-property-dictionary-customize.html to understand what I am talking about.

When you get to the part of creating an XML, continue reading the blog

However, I have written a quick utility for you to download and generate the XML using a CSV file. I am sure the CSV file will be much easier to understand, manage, etc.

Download the XML Generator from HERE

Once you have downloaded, and started the software (You will need .Net 4.0 – No features are being used of .Net, however, my VS defaulted to that :) – In a planned upgrade, I will let you connect to your vCAC instance and even apply the configuration – This will then be upgraded to .NET 4.5 for vCAC 5.2 and vCAC 6.0)

For now, here is how you would use it.

image image

Create an CSV file (You could use Excel to do that)

image

The if you don’t have a format of the CSV, you could click on the tools Download Sample CSV to get the file. Off course, for the values, you can either put them one per line or use a pipe (“|”) as a delimiter to put in more than one values (The pipe will be considered as a delimiter), thus giving you the freedom, the XML will however be generated.

Once you have saved your CSV

Select the Input file and give a name for the Output. (Please remember the output file will be saved in the same location as the input file)

image

Once you click on Generate, you will get the XML file. Please remember you cannot use this XML file directly – This is only for you to see. (And potentially backup)

image

In order to generate a XML file directly, Please check the “Single Line” Checkbox and generate. Voila … You get a single line XML, which you can use in vCAC system directly

image

image

 

This is a quick tool i wrote, and is not extensively bug checked. If you face any issues, Please let me know in comments.

If you have any more comments / questions, do let me know

Till next time – Be Curious.

 

Comments

  1. vmguruSeptember 23, 2014 at 9:17 PM

    I actually came up with a similar tool not knowing this one exist till I got pointed to it by one of my readers. I guess now there is two flavors for achieving the same result where is mind is for those who like to do it directly from Excel: http://www.virtualizationteam.com/cloud/vcac-6-property-dictionary-relationship-builder.html

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Juniper Aggregate Interfaces (LACP/No LACP)

Image
Last week, I was implementing link aggregation on Juniper EX Series switches (EX4200). I was moving them off HP switches and putting them into Juniper. We were moving VMWare ESX boxes, NetApp and some physical boxes, though the configuration is very simple, I would like to mention how to do those with these boxes. Points to remember: You will explicitly need to create “Aggregated Ethernet” interfaces on juniper You cannot have more than 64 AE interfaces on a single Virtual Chassis You cannot change the algorithm for load balancing between the multiple links. (If you are interested in the Junipers LAG algorithm read this ) Now having said this, lets look at the common steps, you need to create the Aggregated Ethernet interfaces on the Juniper. root@EX4200#set chassis aggregated-devices ethernet device-count  4 The above command will create 4 “ae” interfaces, after you commit, you should see ae0 – ae 3 created. You can have any value between 1 and 64 in the
Read more

HA Proxy for Exchange 2010 Deployment & SMTP Restriction

Image
Hi ... Sorry I have been away for some time doing some stuff, so I hadn't got a chance to update my blog. I thought I would share my recent experience of deploying an Open Source "Linux Load Balancer" (HA Proxy -  http://haproxy.1wt.eu/  ). This Load Balancer is amazing ... I have been able to do so much with it in the past, here is one of the very simple and effective solutions (Cost wise & Performance) that we gave to the client using this ... I worked with a friend M L N Rao , who was helping me out with the Exchange front of things. Please read on to see .... I have tried to explain how to do it as well as why ... let me know what you think in the comments ... So, here is what happened, Our Exchange Team deployed Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 at a clients location and decided to go with MS-NLB. The MS NLB (Network Load Balancer) is a Load Balancer for different Microsoft products like IIS Servers/ISA/TMG, etc but the truth be told more pain than good for ne
Read more

Configuring Multicasting with Juniper EX switches (Part 1)

Image
Configuring multicast routing using Protocol Independent Multicast in a all Juniper environment is as simple as the Cisco environment, but when I searched, I dint find good articles or KB’s explaining this, so I decided to write one. I am fairly certain that if you have searched and arrived at this post, you know the basics of multicasting and IGMP, but yet, for the benefit of all readers, I will in brief describe the need for multicast. Please note, that this is just the IPv4 version of the story presented in a understandable manner and not all aspects of multicast are covered, but only the ones needed for this post. What is Multicast ? In IPv4 we have 3 kinds of packets, Unicast – One Source, One Destination Broadcast – One source and all destinations Multicast – One source and many destinations Now, all of us are familiar with the first one, we use it almost every minute we are on a network connected equipment. To, explain all this, lets choose different
Read more