Get Supported Hardware Schema Quite some time ago I had the need to retrieve the supported HW versions for an environment.. I don’t remember what the project was, but it wasn’t terribly important so I didn’t bother digging deeper to figure things out - I just worked around the issue. Last month William Lam posted an article on how to do this with PERL.
In this article Which Virtual Hardware Versions (VM Compatibility) Are Supported In vSphere?
The people working on vCenter Orchestrator have created a page for it on Facebook. If you have a facebook account you can visit the page and click on like.
VMware released vCenter Orchestrator 5.1.1 As part of the vCenter 5.1 update 1. I rarely cover these updates on the blog since they are mostly bug fixes. This one is different since it includes some long due functionalities. I did ask for some of these and the dev team did an awesome job implementing them !
vCenter Orchestrator 5.1 provided a lot of new great features at the workflow designer level and integration with the vSphere web client I have detailed in this article.
Have you ever read the official vCenter Orchestrator documentation? If not, I strongly recommend you to check it out. On this page (http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/orchestrator_pubs.html), there is an information treasure of 7 (yes, seven!) guides, which are available in different formats, including mobi and epub, and contain information about every aspect of the Orchestrator configuration and interface.
The only disadvantage of this amazing documentation set is the large number of pages, more than 500, which is the average size of a popular novel.
As vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) gains traction, so too does the need for details on how to extend it using vCenter Orchestrator (vCO). I have kept an eye out for good articles on vCAC and just saw a great one at the DailyHypervisor.com blog around Adding a computer account to Active Directory OU. This is something that we had done for LifeCycleManager (LCM) quite some time back and feel it is a good candidate for a vCO-centeric article.
The purpose of this article is to provide readers with instructions on how to give vCO the ability to read and write Microsoft Excel files (xls / xlsx). Yes, it is 2013 yet there are plenty of reasons why organizations might still be using an Excel spreadsheet instead of a database table.. We won't dwell on that here, instead we'll focus on providing those organizations with a step-by-step guide to provide such functionality to vCenter Orchestrator.
The VMware vCloud suite was made available a few hours ago. While most of its components have been bumped only by a dot one it supports a LOT of new features including two major items :
The new vSphere Web client : The single pane of glass user interface on which you can extend functionality on your own by running your own custom workflows automating and integrating VMware and third party applications.
VMware has just made available its Orchestration plug-in leveraging vCloud Director 5.1 latest and greatest features. This is the most complete automation solution for vCloud Director and is a free download !
To put things in perspective the 1.0 version of the plug-in was released months after vCloud Director 1.0, the 1.5 release weeks after vCloud Director 1.5, the 5.1 version is released together with vCloud Director 5.1. Kudos to the VMware engineering team who have automated the plug-in build process so much that the plug-in could accomodate the changes in pre-release vCloud Director version so quickly.
VMware released the most important upgrade of vCenter Orchestrator. vCenter Orchestrator 5.1 is providing important enhancements geared towards the end user.
vCenter Orchestrator, formely VMO (VMware Orchestrator) and (VS-O) Dunes Virtual Service Orchestrator) was packaged as part of vCenter Server since vSphere4.
As part of this was a rebranding effort and an exhaustive vCenter plug-in synched with the vCenter server release. A year later the 4.1 version brought in scalability with moving to a 64 Bits JVM, performance improvements and reliabilty improvements.
This vCenter Configuration Manager workflow package includes vCenter Orchestrator workflows for managing vSphere Virtual Machines and templates.These are sample workflows for illustrating Configuration Manager’s ability to perform Operating System patching, configuration compliance, Software Provisioning and OS Provisioning.These workflows are compatible with vCenter Orchestrator Rest Plug-in version 1.0.1 and later.
This is version 2.0 of the package. It contains:
Enhancements and Bug fixes in the original (version 1) workflows New workflows to automate OS provisioning and Windows Software distribution functions New workflow package and associated documents can be downloaded from here
