VMware Labs released the Perspectives Plug-in

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You may wonder what "Perspectives" application this may be orchestrating. In fact this plug-in offers a simple way for the VI administrator to give the vCO users access to specific workflows through a web interface.

Citing the official documentation:

"Perspectives is an Orchestrator Web view that allows a limited group of users to run or schedule certain tasks through a Web browser, without logging in to the Orchestrator client. vCenter administrators can use
Perspectives to create subsets of the standard Orchestrator workflow library and define the LDAP groups of users who can access each of these subsets. A user perspective is the set of workflows that an LDAP user group can run. The members of the vCO Admin group can run all tasks in all user perspectives and can perform tasks that are related to the Perspectives Web view management."

Basically the VI Administrator can create a separate perspective with workflows for each LDAP group of users and this way he can give a web access to these workflows to the users in this group. Perpectives allows these users to run these workflows, schedule them, check active, scheduled. completed wokflow runs and events.

Here is an example of my vCloud Director vApp Backup Admin perspective that allows me to define a Backup Virtual Data Center for all backups started by the backup operator.

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Here is the vCloud Director vApp Backup Operator perspective that allows the backup operator to backup and restore vApps on demand or on schedule and to check active, scheduled. completed wokflow runs and events.

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Running the backup manualy.

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And scheduling the vApp Backup

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OK, so we now have a great way to make available workflows to end users using Perspectives. Now do not forget this is a fling and does not come with GSS support. You can certainly test this out with small groups of users in your company but do not intend to use it for a public cloud ... You may wonder why such great functionality is not built in. In fact Perspectives was released previously with a vCO build for the Lifecycle Manager product but it was not advertised, not understood and not leveraged by end users. Without communicating internal information a fling is a way for VMware to release an attempt of implementing a functionality that could not make it in the main release (or could not stay in this case) for various reasons such as not meeting all the quality and system tests requirements. See this as an early preview as what may come next.

For further information, documentation and plug-in download please visit the VMware labs Perspectives fling page.