One of the relatively new 5.x features of vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) is the ability to Enable a workflow to resume on failure. Essentially, this means that a workflow could fail 1/2 or 3/4 the way through and you could go and tell vCO to resume that workflow, perhaps after fixing whatever issue caused it to fail in the first place, rather than start a fresh instance of the workflow. Introduction As noted in the intro snippet, vCO now has the ability to let you resume a failed workflow.

vCO has again been extended with a new plug-in an updates of existing plug-ins. VMware vCenter Orchestrator AWS 1.0 Plug-in (New) VMware vCenter Orchestrator Auto-Deploy 5.5.1 Plug-in (Updated) VMware vCenter Orchestrator Multi-Node 5.5.1 Plug-in (Updated) VMware vCenter Orchestrator AMQP 1.0.3 Plug-in (Updated) VMware vCenter Orchestrator PowerShell 1.0.4 Plug-in (Updated) VMware vCloud Automation Center 6.0.1 Plug-in (Updated) - released date April 25, 2014 (article updated to include this entry)

In a previous article I have explained how the vCO dynamic Types allow to simplify the development of vCO plug-ins and how these are leveraged by VMware vCloud Automation Center XaaS. It is now time to experiment with creating a plugin with leveraging the Dynamic Types plug-in generator package. Warning: You can do it without Java development experience and without having to write a single line of scripting ! As a first step download the Dynamic Types plug-in generator package from VMware communities.

You may have noticed that the vCO 5.5.1 release notes are listing a new feature called “Dynamic Types” “Workflow developers are now able to explore the new Dynamic Types which currently is being shipped with Beta quality. They can easily extend vCenter Orchestrator plug-ins by adding their custom types accessible from the scripting API. New types become available in the inventory right after creation and they could be directly leveraged from the vCAC ASD context as part of the cloud provisioning process and XaaS definition.

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.