In VMware Aria Automation 8.x, there are more resource types being supported than in comparison to vRealize Automation 7.x. Each of these resources has a schema defining the resource properties. You can define a Automation Orchestrator action that binds its inputs to these properties and return the equivalent Automation Orchestrator object. For example, the vSphere components have a

vCenterUuid

and

uuid

property that can be used to return a Automation Orchestrator type, such as

VC:VirtualMachine

. Another good example of this functionality is the built-in

findVcVMByVcAndVMUuid

action introduced in VMware Aria Automation 8.x.

When the resource mapping is created, it is possible to add new day 2 operations on these resources that are workflows that use the matching Automation Orchestrator type as inputs.

The main difference in comparison to vRealize Automation 7.x, is that it uses a workflow for resource mapping. It might be necessary to migrate the workflows to actions to reuse their functionality in VMware Aria Automation 8.x.

Another difference is that VMware Aria Automation 8.x is that the resource mapping can be defined on a resource action basis. For each input of the resource action, it is possible to either expose the input at request time, map it to one of the schema resource properties, or associate a mapping action that uses one or more schema resource properties and returns the same type as the workflow input it binds to. This is useful to pass information from the schema directly without having to change the workflow or create a wrapper workflow that must be used to add the scripting logic to these required to query the VMware Aria Automation resource from Automation Orchestrator.