The vCenter Orchestrator plug-ins are coming with a lot of built in workflows and action scripts. The first thing to do when looking for functionality is to browse the library or use the search filter to find these.
If you do not get exactly what you are looking for, there are chances that some of the existing workflows and actions will contain close enough examples. If you do not find any of these you can still use the API explorer to create your own.
The vCO appliance makes it very easy to deploy vCenter Orchestrator in minutes. My colleague William Lam went a bit further with providing a script that let you pre-define a lot of the configuration settings.
The script leverage the OVF format to set a number of parameters such as the appliance network settings, placement on the virtual infrastructure datastores and network.
You can find out more about it here.
I am looking forward to see more vCO articles from William since he has a very successful VMware scripting blog with a lot of interesting articles.
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.
vCenter Orchestrator uses a powerful log service. This article explains the basics of this service and possible configuration changes.
This article will identify the log files currently in use for a typical vCO server installation. Additionally, it will address the following areas of interest:
Server Log rollover control: MaxFileSize and MaxBackupIndex
Enable REST call logging in the vCloud Director Plug-in
Enable logging to a SYSLOG server
Setting the server and all components to debug mode
The vCenter Orchestrator application server log files are located in install_directory\app- server\server\vmo\log
One of our contributing authors, Sergio Sanchez, has just published a three-part video series on Developing your first VMware vCO Workflow. In this series, Sergio steps you through the process of creating a new workflow to power on a VM and send e-mail from scratch. A couple library actions, a decision box, scriptable tasks, and error handling will be used throughout the series. The actions taken during this video series will be common across nearly all custom workflow development you perform in the future so it serves as a great basis to get you started.
Need vCO to fetch some data from a database for integration purposes ? There is an easy solution with creating a plug-in ...
Jöerg Lew wrote an excellent article on the different options to integrate vCO with a database here. Creating a hibernate based plug-in is definitely the best way to map a database as vCO objects but it is a lot of effort and can get quite complex.
Since there is another much simpler way to create a database plug-in (with read only rights on the database) I thought I should share it.
Getting started with Perspectives Webview
If you have been following VMware vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) for a while, it is likely that you have already seen the Perspectives webview in action. It has been used in one or more vCO demos as a web-based interface to launch a specific set of workflows. A web-based interface for launching workflows is a common requirement in organizations and likely a more secure method.
What is Perspectives?
In some use cases you may want to customize the name of the workflow run/execution to suit your needs. For example it may be more practical to browse the workflow runs with having the name of the object the operation ran on such as "Deploy vApp tcWebServer" instead of the default "Deploy vApp". It can also be usefull if you use the workflow run as a way to identify a particular one from an external application having an ID for it.
Providing customized workflows to an internal or an external customer is a process following a typical software development lifecycle with specific orchestration requirements and best practices for setting up the environments and managing the content lifecycle.
1.1 Workflow Development life cycle
This section summarizes briefly the different steps to observe to deliver custom workflows (or any custom application).
1.1.1 Requirement gathering
Gathering requirement consists of interviewing the customer on project characteristics such as planning, budget, scope, prioritization and constraints but also particular specific technical requirements such as:
Ever wondered how your vCenter Orchestrator is doing on memory usage ? vCenter Orchestrator Java Virtual Machine allocates a default of 2 GB Heap space.
It will consume more heap space as processes are running and will ultimately call the garbage collector to keep in memory only the used items.
If you are running a lot of workflows on your server or if you are experimenting custom workflows and plug-ins you may want to know how much of this memory is consumed.
