VRO - EMC Networker 8.1 EBR Appliance integration. Experiences?

Question

I've asked the question on the EMC support forums, btu maybe there's a chance to tap on some knowledge on the topic here: has anyone made experience with integrating the EMC Networker Appliance into the Orchestrator?
Recently I have  deployed the EBR Appliance in my vSphere environment, now I want to automate adding\removing virtual machine to and from the backup policy.
The VMs are being provisiond using vCAC and the vRO. Now I want to allow the VM owner to optionally add the VM into a backup policy. I would need a vRO workflow to talk to the EBR Appliance API so the particular VM would be added.
I could not find a documentation for the EBR Appliance API anywhere, nor a EBR plug-in for vRO.
Thanks!

Answer 1

Thanks for answering so quickly!
About the procedure you have mentioned:
1. Note down the process that you want to automate, and how you do it manually now (you mentioned the first part, I assume currently a Backup Operator adds the new VM to a backup policy using the Networker UI, whatever that is)
The EMC appliance integrates into the Web Client - this is the only interface you can use AFAIK. There you can tell EMC Networker (with the whole Server, DataDomain backend) which VMs you want to back up. You can choose a cluster or resource pool and back up the whole inventory element too. I administer the whole vCenter\vCAC\vRO combo including the EMC Appliance - the appliance itself however has very limited options though. You can basically only add VMs to a backup policy and restore them. The rest (liek creating new backup policies) is done by the Backup Admins on the Networker Server.
2. See if the vendor provides a vRO Plugin, if so, check if it provides your functionality
EMC does provide some plugins, but none of them are strictly backup related and cannot talk to the backup appliance (or, for example, VMwares' VADP)
3. Check if the vendor provides some API  / Automation tools (didnt find anything for these two points)
Nope, sadly. I'm waiting for someone to answer on the EMC forums, next week I'll ask one of the Backup Admins to open a SR at EMC, maybe we will get some useful info. The product documentation says that the Web Client is the only way to manage the appliance, but I don't know if this includes direct access via the API or not. This is really frustrating:(
4. & 5.
The EMC Backup appliance is "VADP Appliance by EMC", a third-party VADP based backup solution.By that I mean that it's VADP with the EMC Backup Infrastructure access integrated. So the whole backup planning jobs are done on the EMC Networker backend, not the appliance itself. The GUI is even the same:
So, I guess, the API access would function similar as with VADP? Sadly I have not yet made experience with it.
6. Worst case (...)
I thought an alternative would be to create a new ressource pool, tell the appliance to back up every vm in there, and just move a vm in or out of the pool according to the vm owners preferences. This move can easily be automated. But, I've tested this jsut now and altohugh, after moving a vm into the pool, the appliance says it will be backed up, it throws an error during the backup job :| Meh.
Is it possible to automate backup tasks on the native VMware VADP appliance using the Orchestrator?