If you are new to vRO or coming form vRO 7.x, you may find restarting vRO a little tricky and might want to know how to restart vRO in an ordered way to avoid any service failure or corrupt configuration etc. Historically, in 7.x version of vRO, there used to have a restart button in its VAMI interface which generally restart it gracefully but version 8.x skipped that ability. However, there are new ways that we’ll see today in this post.

The Official way

According to the KB article 88909, aka the official way, suggests to restart the Orchestrator app

  • By connecting through SSH to the machine and restart the pod using the following commands.
kubectl -n prelude scale deployment vco-app --replicas=0 
kubectl -n prelude scale deployment vco-app --replicas=1
Bash
  • Monitor the pod status using the command below until 3/3 containers are deployed for vco-app pod.
kubectl get pods -n prelude -w
Bash
  • Verify you can login into the UI.

via vSphere – restart VM guest OS

  • Click Virtual Machines in the VMware Host Client inventory, select vRO VM.
  • To restart a virtual machine, right-click the virtual machine and select Power > Restart Guest OS.

via SSH – pod recreation

  • One way is to scale down pods to ZERO which basically destroys them. You can do so by copy paste these commands on your vRO Server over a SSH session.
kubectl scale deployment orchestration-ui-app --replicas=0 -n prelude
kubectl scale deployment vco-app --replicas=0 -n prelude
sleep 120
kubectl scale deployment orchestration-ui-app --replicas=1 -n prelude
kubectl scale deployment vco-app --replicas=1 -n prelude
Bash
  • Other way would be to delete these pods directly using this command. After this command, K8s will auto-deploy the pods back again.
kubectl delete pod vco-app
kubectl delete pod orchestration-ui-app
Bash

Now monitor till both pods will be fully recreated (3/3 and 1/1) using this command: 

kubectl -n prelude get pods
Bash

When all services are listed as Running or Completed, vRealize Orchestrator is ready to use. Generally, pod creation may take up to 5-7 mins.

via SSH – run deploy.sh

  • Login to the vRO appliance using SSH or VMRC
  • To stop all services, run/opt/scripts/deploy.sh –onlyClean
  • To shutdown the appliance, run /opt/scripts/deploy.sh –shutdown
  • To start all services, run /opt/scripts/deploy.sh

Tip You can find this log at /var/log/deploy.log

  • Validate the deployment has finished by reviewing the output from the deploy.sh script
  • Once the command execution completes, ensure that all of the pods are running correctly with the following command ‘kubectl get pods –all-namespaces‘

When all services are listed as Running or Completed, vRealize Orchestrator is ready to use.

via Control Center

  • Go to Control Center.
  • Open System Properties and add a new property.
  • This will auto-restart the vRO in 2 mins.

Rebooting a CExP Orchestrator

Go to Aria Automation SaaS Console and in the Automation Assembler, open Infrastructure tab and select Cloud Proxies and open the Orchestrator that you want to reboot.

Select Reboot from the dropdown and Click Execute.

Older ways to restart vRO services

There are some older ways of restarting vRO and its services, perhaps for vRO 6.x & 7.x only. But these are not valid anymore for version 8.x. They are just here for the records.

via SSH – restart services

  • Take an SSH session and run this command will restart vRO services.
service vco-server stop && service vco-configurator stop
service vco-server start && service vco-configurator start
Bash

via Control Center – Startup Options

  • Open Control Center and go to Startup Options.
  • Click Restart button.

via vRA VAMI – for embedded vRO

  • Open vRA VAMI Interface and go to vRA -> Orchestrator settings.
  • Select Service type and Click Restart button.

That’s all in this post. Please comment down if you use any way other than mentioned here. I’ll be happy to add it here. And don’t forget to share this post.

Update (23-01-2024) Added Rebooting a CExP Orchestrator heading