Yes, you know you can set the refresh for the inventory to an hour ….. an hour… OMG you’ll be watching cat videos and forget what you’re doing before that happens.

Yes, you also know that you can navigate the clicky clicky world of vRA and refresh the inventory on demand as part of the data collection tasks. Sadly Jenkins is a little unwilling to clicky click and demands programmatic access (I know the REST api would be better for this use case, please humour me).

Well, Cloudclient comes to the rescue. In a previous post I introduced you to Cloudclient, a CLI interface to vRA.

The thing to note here is that the compute resources are managed by the IaaS servers and not the vRA appliance itself. Since you’ll be asking the IaaS server to do something (refresh the inventory) you’ll need to ensure your Cloudclient session is logged into the IaaS infrastructure.

vra login iaas --server {iaas-server-vip} --domain {domain} --user {user} --password {password}

vra computeresource list

vra computeresource datacollection start --name {resource-name} --waitforcompletion yes

You’re a wizard!