Download the VMware Press FREE Preview sampler. Containing advance chapters from upcoming VMware Press books and from author Cody Bunch, Mike Laverick, and Mostafa Khalil.
Automating vSphere: With VMware vCenter Orchestrator by Cody Bunch, ISBN: 9780321799913, December 2011
CHAPTER 6: Introduction to Workflow-Fu
Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.0 by Mike Laverick, ISBN: 9780321799920, December, 2011
CHAPTER 9: Configuring the Protected Site
CHAPTER 16: Upgrading from SRM 4.1 to SRM 5.
Quoting the Infoblox press-release:
Today at VMworld® 2011, Infoblox Inc. announced it is delivering a fully integrated plug-in for the VMware vCloud® Orchestrator community. Working with VMware vCloud Director™, the integrated solution provides automated IP addressing and related management capabilities in real-time as virtual machines are created.
As a result, the Infoblox plug-in accelerates private and public cloud deployment, simplifies management and bridges network and virtual IT team silos by enabling automated assignment of IP addresses to virtual machines.
An article listing the vCenter Orchestrator sessions, demos and hands on labs has been posted on the vCO blog. This year Orchestrator is present and used in the background in a lot more places than in the past.Sessions:
Go to CIM3235 to hear about how customers use vCenter Orchestrator as an automation and integration platform for vCloud Director and how VMware IT did it. Go to TEX2923 to learn about workflow development techniques from one of the most experienced vCenter Orchestrator partner / trainer and from VMware engineering.
A few days ago vCenter Orchestrator 4.2 was released as part of vSphere 5 and as previous releases for no extra cost.
This release focus is on bug fixing and improving documentation and providing it in different formats. 2011 effort was mostly on orchestrating more technologies with releasing a lot more plug-ins (7 listed as of now).
Resources:
vCenter Orchestrator 4.2 release notesvCenter Orchestrator 4.2 documentationvCenter Orchestrator 4.2 download (included in vCenter Server 5.
As part of the Cloud Infrastructure and Management Center of Excellence Team who worked on this project we are glad to announce the release of the new vCloud Architecture Toolkit. Amongst many enhancements, this version covers vCenter Orchestrator best practices that have been proven in real-world enterprise and service provider cloud deployments.
Official announcement:
On Monday August 29, 2011 VMware is releasing version 2.0 of the VMware vCloud Architecture Tookit (vCAT).
VMware released a software development kit allowing the creation of plug-in adapters for vCenter Orchestrator.
For the company having development resources it means that they can develop plug-ins for their private usage or for the 200.000+ vCenter customers. For end users this translates into the future availability of a lot more plug-ins.
Quoting the SDK page:
The VMware vCenter Orchestrator Plug-in SDK 4.2 is designed to jumpstart developers who are new to vCO plug-in development.
VMware just released another new vCenter Orchestrator plug-in. The AMQP plug-in.
Quoting part of the release notes:
The VMware vCenter Orchestrator AMQP plug-in allows organizations to automatically trigger workflows based on AMQP messages. Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) is a highly-scalable publish and subscribe message protocol that is increasingly used in cloud architectures. It is the default messaging protocol for vCloud Director 1.5. With the AMQP plug-in, organizations can define policies that automatically trigger specific workflows based on certain AMQP messages.
Brian Knudtson (@bknudtson) talks about new VMware vCenter Orchestrator plug-ins and the vCenter Converter 5.0 beta.
Listen to the podcast here.
If you develop workflows chances are that the plug-ins documentation is a very valuable resource for you. The VMware documentation team has written a short questionnaire about what is helpful or not in the existing guides and what you would like to see covered further. Please take a few minutes to answer here.
VMware has released a Service Manager Integration Platform connector allowing Service Manager to leverage vCenter Orchestrator.
First a little product introduction:
VMware Service Manager is a configurable ITIL platform featuring service desk, automated configuration and change management, IT asset management, self-service and request fulfillment. As part of the service request it supports a configurable portal using high-level business workflow modeling for approvals, notifications and tasks integration.
VMware vCenter Orchestrator is a technical Orchestration authoring platform part of vCenter Server allowing System Engineers to automate repetitive tasks requiring little to no human intervention by creating workflows leveraging extensive integrations with VMware and third parties cloud components.
