vCloud Director has a nice feature allowing to organize vApps into catalogs. If like me you need to replicate these catalog across organization or even different vCloud hosts you may find your solution here.
I have written a solution to do it a long time ago but never had the time to release it publicly. It is now done and here are the features.
Features
This package comes with a rich set of features.
Setting metadata on vCloud Director objects is a convenient way to extend their properties with whatever information you need to attach to these. This is very useful to include information on the object lifecycle or to reference other objects. For example I like to reference the vApp Template a vApp was issued from with adding a "vAppTemplateReference" metadata. Another use of the metadata is that you can search for these using the query service.
VMware has just made available its Orchestration plug-in leveraging vCloud Director 5.1 latest and greatest features. This is the most complete automation solution for vCloud Director and is a free download !
To put things in perspective the 1.0 version of the plug-in was released months after vCloud Director 1.0, the 1.5 release weeks after vCloud Director 1.5, the 5.1 version is released together with vCloud Director 5.1. Kudos to the VMware engineering team who have automated the plug-in build process so much that the plug-in could accomodate the changes in pre-release vCloud Director version so quickly.
With the release of vCloud director 1.5 a new important API feature was introduced : the query service. Quoting the "What's new" whitepaper:
VMware vCloud Director 1.5 also introduces a VMware vCloud API query service,
which can significantly improve developer efficiency, by minimizing the number of API requests and the amount
of data transferred for an API client to obtain needed information. Example query parameters include sorting
and ordering, pagination, filtering, projection, and expressions.
The overall goal of the Custom Deploy vApp workflow is to provide a single call workflow that is capable of instantiating a vApp Template from vCloud Director (vCD) and performing a number of operations on the resulting vApp before actually deploying and powering it on. The workflow is intended to be an example and starting point for deployments that require any or all of these features. It can also be called via 3rd party connectors using the vCenter Orchestrator SOAP API.
You may already have seen the theory on how to extend vCloud Director capabilities with vCenter Orchestrator, you may even have completed the first steps to do it following this tutorial. What about having a complete real use case implementation example such as a vApp Approval, adding Windows VM in Active Directory ? It is now available.
The goal of publishing this package is to give a good starting point implementation with working examples that can be adapted for other requirements.
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 ?
My team and I have helped customers to build private and public clouds using vCenter Orchestrator for the last 5 years. Adding vCloud Director in the picture tremendously helps with providing customers a scalable standardized cloud solution. Most people will think at orchestration as a single entry point on top of the cloud when in fact for several use cases it is recommended to have vCloud Director and vCenter Orchestrator running side by side.
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:
Sometimes the user interfaces are limiting you by design. The APIs are often more permissive and if you know what you are doing you can do great things.
Previously we showed you how to hot clone vCloud Director vApps. We even did a video tutorial for it. Now it is time to do something else the vCloud Director User Interface will not let you do : rename an organization.
My test org has my name so my colleagues know it is mine.
