If you’re reading this article, it may be because you have installed vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) and are interested in using an account other than administrator@vsphere.local to login to the embedded vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) server. By default, the vCO Server uses a “vcoadmins” group in the “vsphere.local” domain provided by the SSO server that vCAC was configured to use. This short tutorial will step you through a pretty basic configuration where I have just deployed a vCAC 6.
A frequent question around vCenter Orchestrator is: Can I read/write to shared folders? The answer is always yes, but the documentation may be difficult to find - especially when you are referring to a Windows share - aka CIFS in samba and *nix mounting terminology. Read on to learn EXACTLY what you need to do to allow your vCO server to read/write to a Windows Share!
Overview: vCO allows limited access to its local filesystem.
This week VMware released vCenter Orchestrator 5.5.1. While this is not a major new release it contains a lot of new features focusing on making vCO content development easier. Also important is a list of deprecated features.
Protocol plug-ins are now included The days where vCO was mainly used to automate vCenter are over. vCO integrates with many third party applications using generic protocol based plug-ins. In previous releases you had to find the latest release, download the plug-ins and install these.
The AD plug-in for vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) allows for the creation of AD:UserGroup objects as well as the management of its members. A missing option though is to define the type of Group to create. Read on to learn how I came up with a workflow that allows you to change the group to any group type and scope you like.
Research The first thing I did is use the workflow from the How to get Active Directory User Attributes article to create a simlar workflow for UserGroups.
vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) is backed by vCloud Director. What does this mean? Well, it means that once you have defined 1 or more Virtual Data Centers, and VMware releases an updated vCD plug-in, you will have access to a vCloud Director Organization! Why is that good and what is the point of this post? Well, in short, this means you can use vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) to do some automation within your vCHS Virtual Data Centers!
Have you ever had the need to get some attributes of your Active Directory user account? Perhaps Manager for an approval, maybe direct reports, etc… but not sure how to work with the AD:User object in vCO… Well here’s a great little snippet that can help you quickly identify the available information attached to the AD:User account you specify.
Show AD User Info Simply place the following script into a scriptable task in a new workflow.
Running commands or scripts in VM guest is something that has been done with vCO for quite a while using different mechanisms. A popular way was to use the VIX plug-in for vCO. This plug-in is not needed anymore since the VIX functionality is part of the vCenter API since vCenter 5.0 and there are guest operations workflows to copy a script and run it into a VM guest OS since vCO 5.
vCenter Orchestrator references workflows by ID and allows to have multiple workflows with the same name. If the workflows you are calling have a unique name you can write a vCO wrapper to find a workflow by name with the following code.
Input: wfName (string)
Output: wfByName (Workflow)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 var workflows = Server.findAllForType("Workflow", "c.name='"+wfName+"'"); var wfByName = null; if (workflows !
When working with new integrations that utilize the vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) REST API you may want additional logging on the vCO side to see what is happening. I came across this need on a recent project. By default, vCO is logging workflow and webview activities but not API calls. This short article walks you through the steps necessary to enable such logging.
The following steps will enable additional logging on your vCO server.
vCloud Automation Center is the VMware hybrid cloud self-service provisioning portal. It can be customized to extend its OOTB functionality. The following tutorial shows how from the vSphere web client create a menu operation to run a program in a guest or how to do it automatically once the VM has been provisioned. This does not involve any scripting !
Prerequisites vCenter Orchestrator configured with:
vCenter plug-in (with the same host used in vCAC) vCAC plug-in 5.
