One of our colleagues, Christian Johannsen has posted a new article on the VMware vCenter Orchestrator blog onhow to automatically create a customized VM in Virtual Center and import it in vCloud director.
Following the release of the Microsoft Active Directory plug-in VMware demonstrates how to combine building block workflows into a custom one.
Did you have trouble getting things "just right" in our previous tutorial "Create your own vCloud Director vApp hot clone in less than one hour"? No worries, we've just added our solution video to YouTube!!
We recently came across a nice little analogy around vCloud Director (vCD) and vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) from one of the folks over at NetApp on their blog. The article "What is vCloud Director, really?" cleverly equates vCD to the manager of an apartment complex and vCO to the maintenance man who does work for the manager and other managers (products). Please take a moment to learn more about vCO through this analogy and see what NetApp has to offer with their plugin for vCO!
This article is the first tutorial covering a practical use of the recently released VMware vCloud Director plug-in. It is meant to be educational rather than exhaustive.
A while ago I wanted to make a copy of a running vCloud director vApp. When you use the vCloud Director user interface as an Organization Administrator you have the following options:
Copy operations are grayed out.
While there is certainly a very good reason for not supporting copy of running vApps I wanted to explore this further with leveraging the vCloud API through the vCenter Orchestrator plug-in for vCD.
These days I had a strange scenario in a large customer environment. Every time I tried to start a workflow via SOAP from a webservice client there was an error. After regarding this in the vCO client I found out that every run from the external webservice client causes the action "getAllVMs" to fail. Disconcertingly the array "VMs" wasn´t filled by the action and there was no error message.
The error occurs later in the workflow because of the empty array.
We are proud to announce that vCO Team members and VMware KB TV have released the "How to install and configure VMware vCenter Orchestrator Plug-in for vCloud Director" video. This video is published on the excellent VMware KB blog and the 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.
vCO Team is delighted to see vCenter Orchestrator knowledge being spread around the world. One of the VMware partners, Mightycare has a few vCO specialists who not only do a great job delivering automation and orchestration to VMware customers but also share their knowledge online. Here is a collection of the last code snippets they have published.
Use and examples of RegExp (regular expression)
Get all Distributed Virtual Switches vCO
Unzip Files with VMware Orchestrator workflow vCO
Access to Java Classes
SOAP connect via VB .
Our friend @cody_bunch at ProfessionalVMware.com hosts an online VCAP Study session every other week. These "Brown Bag" sessions provide expert guidance and feedback on the night's topic. Our very own Burke Azbill recently participated on the panel for the vCenter Orchestrator Brown Bag session. If you happened to miss the session, don't worry - it was recorded and may be viewed here: VCAP-DCA BrownBag - Section 8 Orchestrator Follow-Up.
It has been a while without publishing a tutorial. With the growing activities around vCO the vCO team members have been very busy and doing such tutorials takes a lot of time. Since a lot of you already went through the basics we can now give you some code snippets that you can use in your own workflows. Here is the first one. I will eventually improve the article if people ask for it.
