If you are designing enterprise wide Orchestration you may need to consider more than a single instance of vCenter Orchestrator. The vCenter Orchestrator Multi-Node Plug-in can help you doing so with offering the ability of a vCenter Orchestrator server to remote control other vCenter Orchestrator servers.
What this plug-in provides is:
Publish the remote vCenter Orchestrator library elements (Configurations, Packgaesm Workflows, Actions and Resources) in the master vCenter Orchestrator inventory
Publish the remote vCenter Orchestrator inventory elements (vCenter, vCloud Director, Microsoft AD, Cisco UCS, .
If you have an investment in PowerShell cmdlets such as VMware vSphere PowerCLI but also snapins from other vendors the VMware vCenter Orchestrator plug-in for Microsoft Windows PowerShell can help you to integrate these as part of workflows steps in vCenter Orchestrator.
Citing the release notes:
The plug-in offers many capabilities to workflow developers, such as:
Invoking unmodified scripts by copying and pasting them into workflows
Invoking external scripts and passing workflow parameters as script inputs
Generating a new Orchestrator action from a PowerShell script
Generating a new Orchestrator action for a PowerCLI cmdlet
Browsing snap-ins and their associated cmdlets in the Orchestrator workflow editor
Invoking scripts from the Orchestrator JavaScript API
Converting vCenter Server objects in Orchestrator workflows to PowerShell objects and the reverse
The VMware vCenter Orchestrator plug-in for Microsoft Windows PowerShell 1.
If you are booting your ESXi servers from the network using vSphere Auto Deploy then this plug-in allows you to automate tasks for configuring and provisioning stateless ESXi hosts.
The plug-in exposes an inventory and CRUD opratons for:
ESXi depots
Host profiles
Rule sets
There are workflows to manage answer files and to reprovision a host using answer files, host profiles, new image.
For more information check the VMware vCenter Orchestrator Plug-In for vSphere Auto Deployrelease notes, documentation and download
If you ever wanted to integrate your workflows with a database with having your database records available as part of the inventory then this plug-in will help you to do so.
Chances are that at some point you will need to read or write information from an SQL database as part of your workflows. vCenter Orchestrator provides some scripter / developper capabilities such as the JDBC plug-in and the integration with the hybernate framework.
VCE, the company formed by Cisco and EMC with investments from VMware and Intel is showing a demonstration of their vCenter Orchestrator powered infrastructure provisioning for vCloud Director. This is done with using EMC Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM) which is the single pane of glass managing the stand alone Vblock Element Management applications.
If you followed the vCenter Orchestrator plug-in releases you must have noticed the UCS Manager release. So, how is a UIM plug-in different ?
I will re-iterate what I have said about nine months ago : Today VMware released the most complete automation solution for vCloud Director as a free download ! This is a plug-in for vCenter Orchestrator allowing to orchestrate vCloud Director 1.5 with a large collection of out of the box workflows. The previous version of this plug-in (1.02) is used at several service providers and enterprise customers.
As before in terms of functionality the plug-in allows:
Need vCO to fetch some data from a database for integration purposes ? There is an easy solution with creating a plug-in ...
Jöerg Lew wrote an excellent article on the different options to integrate vCO with a database here. Creating a hibernate based plug-in is definitely the best way to map a database as vCO objects but it is a lot of effort and can get quite complex.
Since there is another much simpler way to create a database plug-in (with read only rights on the database) I thought I should share it.
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
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 .
