vCO

VMware released vCenter Orchestrator 5.5.1

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.

Getting started with vCO and vCHS

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!

Leveraging the Guest Script Manager package

Running commands or scripts in VM guest is something that has been done with vCO for quite a while using different mechanisms. A popular way was to use the VIX plug-in for vCO. This plug-in is not needed anymore since the VIX functionality is part of the vCenter API since vCenter 5.0 and there are guest operations workflows to copy a script and run it into a VM guest OS since vCO 5.

Code snippet : Find a workflow by name

vCenter Orchestrator references workflows by ID and allows to have multiple workflows with the same name. If the workflows you are calling have a unique name you can write a vCO wrapper to find a workflow by name with the following code. Input: wfName (string) Output: wfByName (Workflow) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 var workflows = Server.findAllForType("Workflow", "c.name='"+wfName+"'"); var wfByName = null; if (workflows !

How to Enable vCO 5.1.x to log API requests

When working with new integrations that utilize the vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) REST API you may want additional logging on the vCO side to see what is happening. I came across this need on a recent project. By default, vCO is logging workflow and webview activities but not API calls. This short article walks you through the steps necessary to enable such logging. The following steps will enable additional logging on your vCO server.

How to use the REST API to Start a Workflow

It seems everyday the interest in vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) is growing. I love this because it brings more and more use cases to our attention. One such use case is the need to call vCO workflows via its REST API. In order to keep this article generic, but useful, I will work with the free RESTClient plug-in/add-on for Firefox as the client. The general process here will be similar to what you may need to do from your software or portal to integrate with vCO’s REST API.

Making vCO Workflow Wrappers

A vCO workflow wrapper is a set of workflow tasks that are added at the beginning of a workflow in order to take string values and look up a more complex data type or pre-defining inputs using attributes. You may have done these in the past already in vCO. Some examples would be finding a virtual machine by name or finding an Active Directory user by email address. If you’re running the vCO workflow from within the vCO client or vSphere web client, you probably don’t need to worry about this as both of those tools understand the complex data types that come with plugins.

VMware announced vCenter Orchestrator 5.5

VMware announced vCenter Orchestrator 5.5 : a major release including a lot of important new features. No more excuses to not orchestrate ! And here is the list ! vSphere 5.5 integration vCenter Orchestrator is a component of vSphere 5.5. As such it is automatically installed and configured as part of the vCenter Windows based installation. vCO & vCenter are integrated using Single Sign On. In the vSphere 5.

How to run a Perl Script from a vCenter Orchestrator Workflow

PERL Logo The goal of this tutorial is to create a simple workflow with a single string input that will be passed to a locally hosted Perl script for execution. The results of the script will be returned to vCO and stored in the workflow output. This could come in handy if you have existing systems that already have Perl based management scripts and you wish to incorporate their automation into your Orchestration policies.

Orchestrate NetApp OnCommand Workflow Automation (WFA)

Jeremy Goodrum from NetApp has released the NetApp OnCommand Workflow Automation (WFA) package for vCenter Orchestrator. Also included are a How-to video for using the OnCommand Workflow Automation package for vCenter Orchestrator and a solution video for creating new Multi-Tenant vCloud Director environment using WFA and vCenter Orchestrator. Find more about this here.