7.3

Creating XaaS Blueprints and Actions
By using the XaaS blueprints and resource actions, you define new provisioning, request, or action
offerings and publish them to the common catalog as catalog items.
You can create XaaS blueprints and actions for either requesting or provisioning. The XaaS blueprints for
requesting do not provision items and provide no options for post-provisioning operations. Examples of
XaaS blueprints for requesting include blueprints for sending emails, generating reports, performing
complex calculations, and so on. For an XaaS blueprint, the result is a provisioned item. You can create a
custom resource so that you can access and manage the items on the Items tab.
To define the XaaS specification, you create a blueprint and publish it as a catalog item. After you publish
a catalog item, you must include it in a service category. You can use an existing service or create one. A
tenant administrator or business group manager can entitle the whole service or only the catalog item to
specific users.
If you created a custom resource for a provisioned item, you can create resource actions to define the
post-provisioning operations that the consumers can perform. You can also create resource actions for an
item that is provisioned by a source different from the XaaS blueprints, for example by IaaS. For this
purpose, first you must create a resource mapping to define the type of the catalog item.
Custom Resources
You must create a custom resource so that you can create an XaaS blueprint for provisioning with the
option to access and manage the provisioned items. Custom resources define the items for provisioning,
and you can use them to define post-provisioning operations that the consumers can perform.
You create a custom resource to define a new type of provisioned item and map it to an existing
vRealize Orchestrator object type. vRealize Orchestrator object types are the objects exposed through
the APIs of the vRealize Orchestrator plug-ins. The custom resource is the output type of a blueprint
workflow for provisioning and can be the input type for a resource action workflow.
For example, if you have a running vCenter Server instance, and you also have the vCenter Server plug-
in that is configured to work with vRealize Orchestrator, all of the object types from the vCenter Server
API are exposed in vRealize Orchestrator. The vCenter Server plug-in exposes the vSphere inventory
objects in the vRealize Orchestrator inventory. The vSphere inventory objects include data centers,
folders, ESXi hosts, virtual machines and appliances, resource pools, and so on. You can perform
operations on these objects. For example, you can create, clone, or destroy virtual machines.
For more information about the vRealize Orchestrator object types exposed through the vCenter Server
API, see the vCenter Server Plug-In API Reference for vCenter Orchestrator.
Foundations and Concepts
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