Today a major milestone has been achieved for vCenter Orchestrator.VMware released not one but two very useful plug-ins adapter:
SOAP is a protocol used to implement a web service typically used over HTTP and in combination with a service catalog (Web Service Description Language - WSDL pronounced wisdel). Examples of applications using SOAP are vCenter, vCenter Orchestrator, Lab Manager
REST is the technology behind the World Wide Web, leveraging HTTP verbs and URI to define resources and operations with stateless connections.
VMware just released another new vCenter Orchestrator plug-in. this time it is the turn to vCenter Update Manager to be orchestrated.
The main operations supported by this plug-in are:Creating a patch baseline: This is a patch repository containing the ESX host and VM patches attached to a vCenter. You can filter which patch to get from provider sites based on vendor, product, severity, update type, date.Attach a baseline to a set of vCenter objects.
Quoting the release notes : The VMware vCenter Orchestrator plug-in for Microsoft Active Directory allows organizations to automate the management of directory services tasks, particularly as they pertain to cloud provisioning use cases. For instance, the plug-in enables the automatic provisioning of vCloud Director organizations based on data retrieved from Active Directory. The plug-in also includes many administrative actions related to computers, organizations, user groups, and users, such as resetting passwords or adding users to a user group.
As some of you may know, VMware recently launched an official vCenter Orchestrator blog! The team at VMware has put together a nice sample scenario post that walks you through the use of the Cisco UCS Manager plug-in. Be sure to stop by and check it out! To keep up on the posts there, feel free to follow their RSS Feed.
With this release vCenter Orchestrator is extending his reach in the automation of the cloud infrastructure with managing the physical infrastructure supporting it. For those that do not know yet it is installed as part of vCenter (starting with version 4.0) and usable at no additional cost. It is the only Orchestrator platform supporting full functionality of vCenter and vCloud Director. With the release of the Cisco UCS Manager the end to end provisioning of physical resources - virtual infrastructure - multi-tenant cloud Organizations, virtual Datacenters, vApps is now possible.
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 (and not the other way around, vCD 1.01 does not have the ability to start an external process).
In terms of functionality the plug-in allows:
Tenants to automate catalogs and vApp provisioning and decommissioning operations within their organization.
Service providers to automate the configuration and management of the tenant organizations, their virtual data centers and their resources.
The following videos are a preview of the upcoming VMware vCloud Director vCO plug-in. Since its release with vCenter 4, the main vCO plug-in has been for vCenter by fully supporting its API and providing several technical workflows. vCloud Director is already becoming VMware's next major API and as such will be fully supported by a vCO plug-in. The demonstration below shows examples on how to take advantage of this new plug-in and benefit from vCO powered automation.
We are proud to announce that vCO Team members and VMware labs today released a vCO (4.1) VIX plug-in for the VIX API version 1.10. If you wonder what VIX is here is an extract of the VIX landing page:
"The VIX API allows you to write programs and scripts that automate virtual machine operations, as well as the guests within virtual machines. This API is high-level, easy to use, and practical for both script writers and application programmers.
