EMC released a Compute as a Service white paper documenting design considerations leveraging vCenter Orchestrator and its vCloud Director, AMQP and REST plug-in
With these components EMC created a workflow running the following operations:
Provision storage from EMC Symmetrix VMAX or EMC VNX based on the vCenter High Availability cluster.
Create the datastore.
Create the provider virtual datacenter.
Create the organization virtual datacenter within the provider virtual datacenter.
Create the catalog on the organization datacenter
The whitepaper shows the workflow design, a simple custom web portal to start it and the workflow execution record.
VMware release a version 1.02 of the vCenter Orchestrator Plug-in for vCloud Director (1.0 or 1.01).
This is a maintenance release.
Quoting the release notes :
Version 1.0.2 of the vCloud Director plug-in improves the performance, addresses a number of issues, and includes the sample workflow package. To upgrade the plug-in, you must install version 1.0.2 on top of your existing installation.
It is recommended to update to this version since it corrects a problem happening when workflows waiting for a vCloud Director task are running concurrently and other issues.
OK, so we told you about the great new plug-in that VMware has made available for vCO to work with AMQP, but now what? You'll need a couple things to get started before you can run off and code a bunch of cool workflows so let's step through this initial process...
Get and Install AMQP Server (RabbitMQ)
Configure Publisher (vCloud Director 1.5)
Configure Consumer (vCenter Orchestrator)
Apply Policy Template to create new Policy
How to create new Policy manually
Starting the Policy
Get and install an AMQP server.
In a previous article we demonstrated how vCenter Orchestrator can leverage the vCloud Director plug-in to automate tasks or create new functionality by combining them. These workflows are initiated by vCenter Orchestrator.
Now if you would like to have vCO triggering workflows based on vCloud Director events (For example an end user task started from the vCloud Director UI, a system event or a task started from the vCloud API) you will be able to leverage the vCloud Director 1.
One of our colleagues, Christian Johannsen has posted a new article on the VMware vCenter Orchestrator blog onhow to automatically create a customized VM in Virtual Center and import it in vCloud director.
Did you have trouble getting things "just right" in our previous tutorial "Create your own vCloud Director vApp hot clone in less than one hour"? No worries, we've just added our solution video to YouTube!!
We recently came across a nice little analogy around vCloud Director (vCD) and vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) from one of the folks over at NetApp on their blog. The article "What is vCloud Director, really?" cleverly equates vCD to the manager of an apartment complex and vCO to the maintenance man who does work for the manager and other managers (products). Please take a moment to learn more about vCO through this analogy and see what NetApp has to offer with their plugin for vCO!
This article is the first tutorial covering a practical use of the recently released VMware vCloud Director plug-in. It is meant to be educational rather than exhaustive.
A while ago I wanted to make a copy of a running vCloud director vApp. When you use the vCloud Director user interface as an Organization Administrator you have the following options:
Copy operations are grayed out.
While there is certainly a very good reason for not supporting copy of running vApps I wanted to explore this further with leveraging the vCloud API through the vCenter Orchestrator plug-in for vCD.
We are proud to announce that vCO Team members and VMware KB TV have released the "How to install and configure VMware vCenter Orchestrator Plug-in for vCloud Director" video. This video is published on the excellent VMware KB blog and the VMwareKB channel on youtube. We definitely recommend you to subscribe to these and to follow VMware KB on twitter.
Thousands of visitors have consulted our installation and configuration articles in the last few months and these are the only articles getting more and more traffic week after week.
Today VMware released the most complete automation solution for vCloud Director as a free download !
This is a plug-in for vCenter Orchestrator allowing to orchestrate vCloud Director (and not the other way around, vCD 1.01 does not have the ability to start an external process).
In terms of functionality the plug-in allows:
Tenants to automate catalogs and vApp provisioning and decommissioning operations within their organization.
Service providers to automate the configuration and management of the tenant organizations, their virtual data centers and their resources.
