The Jenkins plugin for vRA has been enhanced! The plugin has matured since it’s inception as part of a hack-a-thon during the holiday’s. See below for a list of enhancements.
- vRA deployments can now be called in Jenkins build environments, build steps or post-build actions
- vRA deployments can now be destroyed as part of post-build actions. Note that if the Jenkins build environment option is used, the deployments are automatically destroyed at the end of the build.
- Information such as environment name, machine names with IPs and NSX load-balancer VIPs are written back to Jenkins as environment variables.
Environment variables and Jenkins
If you’re familiar with Jenkins then you should be familiar with environment variables. The plugin writes environment information from vRA as environment variables in Jenkins. Each deployment is assigned an environment variable allowing you to resolve the name.
for example:
VRADEP_BE_NUMBER_NAME : Provides the deployment name where NUMBER is an increment starting from 1. The number corresponds to the order of deployments specified under the build environment section.
example: VRADEP_BE_1_NAME=CentOS_7-18373323
You can leverage the variables in build steps or post-build actions. For example: The post-build action to destroy a vRA Deployment takes the environment variable as a parameter for the “Deployment Name”
The project page at github has additional information on utilizing the plugin and provides a deeper dive into the environment variables produced by the plugin.
If you have any questions feel free to post them on this blog or hit me on twitter. If you find any bugs, then please log the bugs on the Jenkins project page.
InkySea 