Sending Emails from ABX Actions in vRA8

As a fan of the ABX functionality in vRA8, I have been wanting to accomplish sending an email from an ABX for a while now. While there are plenty of resources available online for sending emails using public providers like Gmail or Amazon’s Simple Email Service (SES), I wanted to find a way to send emails using my internal MS Exchange Server. This proved to be a bit more challenging, but with some late nights and experimentation with different Python libraries, I was able to achieve my goal. In this blog post, I will share the steps I took to send an email from an ABX in vRA8.

First, I created four action constants to hold sensitive information:

| Name | Value |

| — | — |

| smtpLoginUsername | administrator@automationpro.lan |

| smtpServer | 10.0.10.13 |

| smtpLoginPassword | ****** (redacted) |

| smtpSender | administrator@automationpro.lan |

Next, I added each of these action constants as inputs for the ABX action. To do this, I selected “Action Constant” in the Type dropdown menu.

Two dependencies are required for this action to work properly. The first dependency is the exchangelib library, which can be found on GitHub. It’s important to specify the version of exchangelib as later versions have a conflict within the ABX execution environment. I used version 1.4.0 for my tests.

The second dependency is the python-dotenv library, which allows you to load environment variables from a .env file. This is necessary because the smtpLoginPassword action constant contains sensitive information that should not be hardcoded in the ABX.

With these dependencies added, I set up an event subscription to trigger the action to execute. This can be done by selecting “Event Subscription” in the Type dropdown menu and specifying the appropriate event. For example, you could subscribe to the “Deployment Completed” event to send an email after a deployment is complete.

Of course, you can add other inputs to the ABX action to include useful information such as the deployment name or any other relevant details. This will allow you to send more informative emails and make the process more efficient.

While it may seem like overkill to use an ABX to send an email, there are several benefits to this approach. For one, you don’t have to rely on external email providers, which can be useful in certain situations. Additionally, using an internal Exchange Server allows you to leverage the security and reliability of your own email infrastructure.

In conclusion, sending emails from ABX actions in vRA8 is a bit more involved than using public providers, but it’s definitely possible. By following these steps and using the appropriate dependencies, you can send emails from your ABX actions without relying on external services.