You have now no more excuses for not using vCenter Orchestrator: you can now have it up and running in a few minutes.
With the vCenter Orchestrator Virtual Appliance the configuration is now reduced to the bare minimum (on the Windows version there is quite a lot of configuration to do and important pre-requisites including a directory service and database).
This is ideal for loading a vCO dev / test environment (including a mobile lab on your laptop) either by importing the provided OVF in vCenter or in Workstation or Fusion (For fusion you will need to use ovftool in command line).
Here is yet another vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) plug-in. This time to enable a set of discovery and monitoring features.
Citing the CIM plug-in summary page:
ESX includes a CIM Object Manager (CIMOM) that implements a set of server discovery and monitoring features. With the VMware CIM SMASH/Server Management API, clients that use industry-standard protocols can do the following:
Enumerate system resources
Monitor system health data
The plugin is general enough to support other CIM compliant services and is not limited only to ESX.
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
If you think you have to be a development guru that knows programming languages in order to create functional workflows with vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) then think again! With hundreds of worfklows and actions to use as building blocks with a vanilla install of vCO, you can be on your way to creating workflows in no time. While it is true that JavaScript is used for the scriptable tasks within Orchestrator, you don't actually have to write any code for some simple, but functional, workflows.
VMware released nine plug-ins for vCenter Orchestrator this year (and there is more than a quarter left !) and decided that it would be best for customers to have all of the docs gathered in one place in a more user friendly and searchable format.
vCenter Orchestrator Plug-ins Documentation Center allows from one single page to browse the different plug-ins documentation.
Also these documentation guides are also made available in .
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.
Following their press-release and VMworld 2011 presentation Infoblox has now published a technical note which can help you to learn how the Infoblox VMware vCenter Orchestrator Plug-in alleviates the challenges of IP Address Management within rapidly expanding virtualized environments.
Quoting a part of the Tech Note:
The plug-in was developed for and is delivered with the VMware vCenter Orchestrator (vCO), which works in tandem with the VMware vCloud Director (vCD). The vCD provides automated IP addressing and related management capabilities in real time as virtual machines are created and destroyed.
vCenter Orchestrator 4.2 shipped with vCenter 5 including a vCenter 4.1 plug-in. While being usable with vCenter 5 it does not leverage the new functionality of vCenter 5. This has now being taken care of with the release of the vCenter 5 plug-in. Not only the plug-in exposes 100% of the vCenter 5 API it also provides a lot of additional workflows for networking and host configuration.
Some of these workflows include:
This SNMP plug-in allows vCenter Orchestrator to connect and receive information from Simple Network Management Protocol enabled systems.
In terms of capabilities the plug-ins allows to:
Register SNMP hosts, Add SNMP GET, GETNEXT and GETBULK queries to retrieve device from host MIBs (Management Information Base) using OIDs (Object Identifier): Running these workflows will add new items to the inventory.
Set policies to listen to trap events coming from SNMP hosts and to start remediation workflows
Growing interest in vCenter and vCloud Orchestration has led to the creation of a new training course for vCenter Orchestrator.
This three days hands on training is available in classroom, onsite or online. It is aimed at vCenter Orchestrator beginners and requires vSphere administrators and basic scripting skills. Areas covered are installation and configuration, architecture, use of the library workflows and development of custom workflows interacting with external systems.
For knowing some of the folks involved in designing and giving the course (Brian and Jörg) we heartily recommend it.
