External services
Another use case for vRO is the creation of so-called external services or XaaS as VMware calls it. In vRA, XaaS means basically anything which can be automated and is orderable as a service.
By using vRO as a platform, a workflow can be an easy-to-create but yet powerful asset to provide third-party functionalities. Also, there are plenty of vRO plugins, which bring their own workflows for specific vendor products. By leveraging the XaaS feature, it is much easier to include those vendors and their products into the vRA portal. This means that also their offerings can be orderable as services by a given end user.
A couple of things are very helpful when using the XaaS feature of vRA with vRO:
- An item is only shown in vRA if the workflow has an output parameter which vRA can understand.
- Actions on XaaS services can be defined separately in vRA and assigned to the service. These actions are workflows on their own in vRO.
- If an item should be destroyed after the service is deleted...
