Manage Services on your ESXi Hosts with vCO

Last Updated on Monday, 23 April 2012 22:10 Written by Burke Azbill

We've all seen that vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) is quite powerful in automating many aspects of your Infrastructure through the variety of specific and generic plug-ins. While there are hundreds of workflows and actions for vCenter included in a clean install of vCO, they simply don't cover every single thing you may want to do. One such example has come up a few times in the VMware Communities: Managing Services. The following article will walk you through creating a simple workflow that allows you to manage services on a specified ESXi (VC:HostSystem) server.

Leveraging the VMware vCloud Director query service

Last Updated on Tuesday, 17 April 2012 12:59 Written by Christophe Decanini

alt

With the release of vCloud director 1.5 a new important API feature was introduced : the query service. Quoting the "What's new" whitepaper:

VMware vCloud Director 1.5 also introduces a VMware vCloud API query service,
which can significantly improve developer efficiency, by minimizing the number of API requests and the amount
of data transferred for an API client to obtain needed information. Example query parameters include sorting
and ordering, pagination, filtering, projection, and expressions.

Following the development of vCloud Director prior to its first release I have begged for having this feature as a public API on several occasions. I now use it on a regular basis in my workflows. This article explains the reasons you may have to leverage the query service and gives an example on how to use it.