Today a major milestone has been achieved for vCenter Orchestrator.VMware released not one but two very useful plug-ins adapter:
SOAP is a protocol used to implement a web service typically used over HTTP and in combination with a service catalog (Web Service Description Language - WSDL pronounced wisdel). Examples of applications using SOAP are vCenter, vCenter Orchestrator, Lab Manager
REST is the technology behind the World Wide Web, leveraging HTTP verbs and URI to define resources and operations with stateless connections.
VMware just released another new vCenter Orchestrator plug-in. this time it is the turn to vCenter Update Manager to be orchestrated.
The main operations supported by this plug-in are:Creating a patch baseline: This is a patch repository containing the ESX host and VM patches attached to a vCenter. You can filter which patch to get from provider sites based on vendor, product, severity, update type, date.Attach a baseline to a set of vCenter objects.
Uptime software realized early on that many orchestration solutions could involve very expensive software suites and services. They chose to extend their product by plugging it into VMware's vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) to allow for automated remediation of issues discovered by their monitoring solution. The following video provides an overview of up.time's capabilities:
UpTime's integration with vCO is not a bolt-on solution; they have the integration as a core feature of their product.
Pearsons and VMware are joining forces. They have announced VMware Press and three upcoming book for the fall 2011 including one covering vCenter Orchestrator named "Automating Day-to-Day Administration of VMware vSphere 5.x".
Quoting the summary:
This hands-on technical guide to automating vSphere with Orchestrator teaches administrators how to save time and resources by automating their virtual infrastructure. Automation expert Cody Bunch teaches valuable practices and tool use through a combination of real world automation examples and case studies.
Do you want to know more about vCenter Orchestrator ? Do you like vCenter Orchestrator and think it should deserve more attention ?
VMworld 2011 Session Voting is now open (May 9 - May 18) and there are nine sessions listed for vCO:
1222Orchestration - From Infrastructure to Cloud
1440 vCenter Orchestrator - The Missing "Getting Started" Session
1441 Developing Workflows for vCenter Orchestrator (vCO)
1622vSphere Automation 101
2049 How OCLC Used vCenter Orchestrator to Automate the Disk Alignment of 1500 + Virtual Machines2302 Reducing Opex and Accelerating IT Service Delivery with vCenter Orchestrator
2923vCenter Orchestrator Workflow Development Best Practices
2982 Creating a vCenter Orchestrator Plugin – Lessons Learned
3235Leveraging vCenter Orchestrator for your Cloud Deployment and Operations
Session details and links to vote below.
Thomas Corfmat, the vCenter Orchestrator Product Manager released his first blog article.
Thomas has been with VMware for a few months only but it seems to me this was much longer since he has been very active pushing the product capabilities (i.e vCloud, Cisco UCS, Microsoft AD Plug-ins releases and a lot more to come this year), leading the marketing activities (vCO Achilles's heal) and with reaching out to customers and partners to make sure we have the best cloud orchestration platform.
Quoting the release notes : The VMware vCenter Orchestrator plug-in for Microsoft Active Directory allows organizations to automate the management of directory services tasks, particularly as they pertain to cloud provisioning use cases. For instance, the plug-in enables the automatic provisioning of vCloud Director organizations based on data retrieved from Active Directory. The plug-in also includes many administrative actions related to computers, organizations, user groups, and users, such as resetting passwords or adding users to a user group.
As some of you may know, VMware recently launched an official vCenter Orchestrator blog! The team at VMware has put together a nice sample scenario post that walks you through the use of the Cisco UCS Manager plug-in. Be sure to stop by and check it out! To keep up on the posts there, feel free to follow their RSS Feed.
With this release vCenter Orchestrator is extending his reach in the automation of the cloud infrastructure with managing the physical infrastructure supporting it. For those that do not know yet it is installed as part of vCenter (starting with version 4.0) and usable at no additional cost. It is the only Orchestrator platform supporting full functionality of vCenter and vCloud Director. With the release of the Cisco UCS Manager the end to end provisioning of physical resources - virtual infrastructure - multi-tenant cloud Organizations, virtual Datacenters, vApps is now possible.
VMware now has a formal home at VMware blogosphere to communicate about vCenter Orchestrator.
You can expect upcoming posts from the vCO product, engineering and professional services teams.
Check the welcome article and make sure to subscribe to the RSS feed.
