On the VMware blog I have explained how vRealize Automation Anything as a Service (XaaS) work with Orchestrator and how a vRO plug-in works.
In this tutorial I will walk you through how I managed to implement Microsoft DNS as a service I used for the screenshot examples on that blog including:
The Microsoft DNS dynamic types plug-in DNS record as a service in vRA DNS record as a blueprint component This is the first public tutorial on how to create a Dynamic Types plug-in from scratch and the overall methodology used applies to other integrations.
In previous tutorials we created inventory object types, their children objects, workflows to operate these that we packaged for our end users.
In this tutorial we are going to create an orchestrator plug-in to list vCO / vRO workflows ! You may wonder why doing so ?
This is a good use case for leveraging some of the more advanced features of the plug-in generator v2 to handle complex REST APIs and improving performance when needed.
In a previous article I have explained how Dynamic Types work and how these are very useful to create a vCO / vRO plugin that will enable the XaaS capabilitites of vCAC / vRA.
Then explained how to build your own twitter plug-in using the plug-in generator package. I have now extended the capabilities of the plug-in generator and will attempt to demonstrate these in this new series of articles. This article use NSX as the orchestrated endpoint but following the explanation included on this tutorial you should be able to get it to work with many REST web service.
Hello all you end user compute admins! If you've been waiting for a vCO plug-in for your Horizon environment, your wait is over. Join Aaron Black in this "Getting Started with vCenter Orchestrator Horizon Plug In" video.
In order to get the plug-in, you must be licensed for Horizon 6.0 Enterprise. For a quick link to the download (login required at VMware's site), click Links -> Plug Ins, then scroll down to the "
vCO has again been extended with a new plug-in an updates of existing plug-ins.
VMware vCenter Orchestrator AWS 1.0 Plug-in (New)
VMware vCenter Orchestrator Auto-Deploy 5.5.1 Plug-in (Updated)
VMware vCenter Orchestrator Multi-Node 5.5.1 Plug-in (Updated)
VMware vCenter Orchestrator AMQP 1.0.3 Plug-in (Updated)
VMware vCenter Orchestrator PowerShell 1.0.4 Plug-in (Updated)
VMware vCloud Automation Center 6.0.1 Plug-in (Updated) - released date April 25, 2014 (article updated to include this entry)
In a previous article I have explained how the vCO dynamic Types allow to simplify the development of vCO plug-ins and how these are leveraged by VMware vCloud Automation Center XaaS. It is now time to experiment with creating a plugin with leveraging the Dynamic Types plug-in generator package.
Warning: You can do it without Java development experience and without having to write a single line of scripting !
As a first step download the Dynamic Types plug-in generator package from VMware communities.
On a recent project, I was having trouble figuring out why invoking a SOAP operation kept failing with the vCO SOAP plug-in. The inputs I was providing appeared to be correct and worked just fine with soapUI. This short tutorial will teach you how to use the SOAPInterceptor to display the Header and Body that the SOAP plug-in is sending.
SOAP Operation Auto-Generated Workflow A typical Invoke Operation workflow looks similar to the above image.
It has just been announced on the VMware Orchestrator communities, several plug-ins have been updated with some critical updates, some new requested features and some minor fixes.
Quoting the communities post:
vCO-Powershell-Plug-in -1.0.1 - kerberos support added
vCO-SQL-Plug-in -1.1.0 - two related plugins combined with auto-generation as well as advanced SQL scripts. A few important issues fixed.
vCO-vCenter-Plug-in - 5.0.1.1 - Critical update. Fixes a major issue with performance and losing attributes value.
Quoting the release notes:
The VMware vCenter Orchestrator plug-in for vShield allows vShield administrators to simplify the management of their vShield infrastructure by extending the robust workflow automation platform of VMware to the vShield environment. These workflows are built using the drag-and-drop capability of the workflow editor in the Orchestrator client. vCenter Orchestrator uses the plug-in to access the functionality of vShield and the vShield APIs. The included, pre-built workflows simplify the process to get you started with custom workflow creation.
Another new VMware plug-in release for vCenter Orchestrator, this time for vCenter Chargeback Manager.
You can use the plug-in to run Orchestrator workflows that automate vCenter Chargeback processes. In this release, the plug-in contains sample workflows.
You can also create custom workflows that implement the plug-in API to automate tasks in your vCenter Chargeback Manager environment.
The vCenter Chargeback Manager plug-in API provides various Javascript objects such as cost models, fixed costs, and hierarchies, that are created in you vCenter Chargeback Manager instance.
