This is the 2nd part of the previous post Some tips for new vCO plug-in developers (I). These tips are more focused on the workflows than on the plug-in project itself.
Again I've grouped them by type.
Workflows & Actions
Start developing workflows as building blocks
A building block would be a simple workflow that requires some few input parameters and returns some simple output. If we have a rich (and good) set of building blocks it will be much easier to create higher-level workflows and we will offer the users a better set of tools to compose their own complex workflows.
Here is a small list of tips for those ones who start with the vCO plug-in development. Some of the tips are just some kind of advice that will help you to keep the things clear. Others may make you think about future and possible problems and how to face them up. And finally some other tips will be useful "just" to avoid simple (~ easy-to-fix) problems usually reported by the QA engineers before the final users.
vCO is shipped with a large library of actions and workflows for the most common vCenter operations. However since vCenter is extremely rich in terms of features and you may have been in the situation where there is no action or workflow for a given vCenter Operation. Thanks to vCO vCenter plug-in exposing the entire vCenter API as javascript objects and methods you can always explore its API documentation and craft your own actions and workflows.
We are proud to announce that vCO Team members and VMware KB TV today released vCO 4.1 installation and configuration videos. These videos were published on the excellent VMware KB blog and VMwareKB channel on youtube. We definitely recommend you to subscribe to these and to follow VMware KB on twitter.
Thousands of visitors have consulted our installation and configuration articles in the last few months and these are the only articles getting more and more traffic week after week.
In part two of this series, you learned how to use a user interaction workflow element to allow for an approver to approve a server request. You also learned that a number of permissions are required throughout vCO in order for the approval to actually perform the server request. It is likely that you would have to modify permissions on several other workflows and actions throughout vCO in order for tutorial 2 to fully work for a non-admin account.
VMware's vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) ships with a rich library of workflows and actions. The workflows are often designed to handle a single object instance such as a VM. Technical workflows frequently require selecting several VMs by VM folder, resource pool, or by one of their properties (power state, Operating System, Hardware version ...).
Some of our readers have asked how to deal with selecting VMs for a mass operation workflow. This article should cover the basis required to do so.
Have you ever tried opening a VMware Lifecycle Manager (LCM) report.xml file with Excel? Probably didn't have much luck, right? The following brief tutorial will walk you through the steps necessary to make these reports generate XML files that can be opened by Excel (Disclaimer: I did my tests with Excel 2007.) Please click the Read More link to see the rest of this article.
Finding the Report Workflows and Editing them
To get started, you will need to launch your vCenter Orchestrator Client.
The recently released vCenter Orchestrator 4.1 requires and takes advantage of a 64-bit OS. For development purposes, it can be desirable to have a single server to perform the following roles:
Windows Domain Controller (Active Directory)
E-mail Server (POP3/SMTP)
Database Server
vCenter Server
vCO Server
vCO Client
This short article is intended to help you get all these services running on a single server. Setting up these features in an incorrect order may result in conflicting ports and/or the inability to get some of the software installed.
In my previous article How to install vCenter Orchestrator (vCO), I walked you through a screen-by-screen installation of vCO. The only major item lacking from that previous article is the ever-important configuration steps. In the past, many people have had troubles with getting the configuration of vCO correct. This article is an effort to help walk you through each of the screens to provide you insight and recommendations on how to get vCenter Orchestrator configured and working in your environment.
This second tutorial assumes you have completed part 1 and use the Provision VM workflow.
Concepts covered in this article include:
How to create a Workflow using subworkflows
How to map inputs, outputs, and attributes
How to use user interactions
How to do basic presentations
How to use validation presentation properties
How to handle exception and write to the event log
How to use vCO Server and System objects in scriptable boxes
How to use the API search
How to launch a Workflow from the vCenter Orchestrator Client
How to launch a Workflow from a webview, using the vCenter Orchestrator Weboperator
How to set rights on workflows
How to set up the vCO mail plug-in
NOTE: Webviews were deprecated and removed in vRealize Orchestrator 7.
