VMware education has released a series of vCenter Orchestrator instructional videos.
These short instructional videos, between 5 and 20 minutes in length and presented by VMware Senior Technical Trainer Brian Watrous, cover the following topics:
Introducing vCenter Orchestrator Overview : Introduction of the features and benefits of vCenter Orchestrator.
Introducing vCenter Orchestrator Demo : This video demonstrates using a vCenter Orchestrator workflow to gather information.
Installing and Configuring vCenter Orchestrator : This video covers the different ways to install and configure vCenter Orchestrator.
vCloud Director 5.1 has some new features, one of them allows to keep vApp Templates information that are by default discarded. My colleague William Lam covers this very well in this article. If you think this would be good to have this functionality as a workflow then you can have it in about 5 minutes with creating it on your own.
First thing is there is no out of the box workflow that download a lossless vApp Template but there is one to download a vApp Template.
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.
If you were at VMworld, during Steve Herrod (VMware CTO) session you could answer in real time to some questions. One of them was Over the next 3 years, how do you plan to manage your hardware infrastructure for your VMware environment ? Primarily from:
vCenter : 62%
A converged hardware management tool: 32 %
Existing element management tools: 6%
It is a good thing most of you want to, it is even better that the vSphere 5.
We've all seen that vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) is quite powerful in automating many aspects of your Infrastructure through the variety of specific and generic plug-ins. While there are hundreds of workflows and actions for vCenter included in a clean install of vCO, they simply don't cover every single thing you may want to do. One such example has come up a few times in the VMware Communities: Managing Services. The following article will walk you through creating a simple workflow that allows you to manage services on a specified ESXi (VC:HostSystem) server.
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.
If you like the VMware vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) Appliance because it is easy to deploy, configure and use then you may want to improve it with enabling additional features.
I like very much the vCO appliance but I recognize it has a few shortcomings:
The vCO web start client does not work well on Mac since it does not preserve the client preferences.
I am missing local shell control and live logs.
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.
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.
