It looks like this project is going to be moving forward again… time to dust off the Python code and finish out the last few pieces to the puzzle.
Interestingly enough I ran into a quick problem testing my original code. It looks like something had changed with the “Profile” that we’re using for each Edge. When I run my original Python script I’m getting a HTTP/400 returned along with the following response code, Interface “CELL1” present in Profile but not in Edge. Looking through some of the JSON data it would appear that something has changed with the Profile that I’m using in the configuration. The error I’m getting when calling rest/configuration/updateConfigurationModule likely means that I’m missing some required data in my Jinja templates that the VMware VeloCloud Orchestrator is now expecting.
There is a Chrome extension called VeloCloud Developer Assistant, that can help you break down the JSON data and make it a little easier to visually consume and troubleshoot. I personally prefer just going into the Chrome developer tools and copying out the entire JSON data block that’s being posted and then running that through some JSON formatting tool to help clean it up for human consumption. If you go through the steps in the web UI with the Chrome developer tools open, can you go back and extract all the JSON data that is being sent to the VeloCloud Orchestrator, and in short you can easily reverse engineering the calls and the JSON data.
In the end I was able to find the missing CELL1 interface under the routedInterfaces element. I added the missing data elements to the Jinja template and everything started working again. I ended up writing a few other supporting scripts to help with the overall project goal. I wrote a Perl script to poll the existing hardware to gather up all the IP configuration details from each VLAN and interface which then can be fed into the Python script to build the configuration within the VeloCloud Orchestrator. There’s also a management IP required, so I used a snippet of Perl code that I wrote back in 2016 to call the Infoblox API to assign the next available IP address in the management subnet.
With the Jinja templates it’s relatively easy to put this code onto a web server and build a simple WebUI around some Python or PHP code to generate new configurations when needed.
Cheers!