Did you miss the @PowerScripting folks as they interviewed the vCO Management Team? If so, don't worry - the session was recorded! See below for details: Thomas Corfmat - vCO Product Manager Hemant Gaidhani - vCO Product Marketing Manager with bonus commentary from one of VMware's PowerShell gurus: Alan Renouf Learn more about vCO and the new support/integrations with PowerShell. Links/Resources: PowerScripting Blog Article: http://powerscripting.wordpress.com/2012/01/16/episode-172-vcenter-orchestrator/ Video: http://static.bambuser.com/r/player.swf?username=PowerScripting PodCast: http://feeds.

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.

If you are designing enterprise wide Orchestration you may need to consider more than a single instance of vCenter Orchestrator. The vCenter Orchestrator Multi-Node Plug-in can help you doing so with offering the ability of a vCenter Orchestrator server to remote control other vCenter Orchestrator servers. What this plug-in provides is: Publish the remote vCenter Orchestrator library elements (Configurations, Packgaesm Workflows, Actions and Resources) in the master vCenter Orchestrator inventory Publish the remote vCenter Orchestrator inventory elements (vCenter, vCloud Director, Microsoft AD, Cisco UCS, .

If you have an investment in PowerShell cmdlets such as VMware vSphere PowerCLI but also snapins from other vendors the VMware vCenter Orchestrator plug-in for Microsoft Windows PowerShell can help you to integrate these as part of workflows steps in vCenter Orchestrator. Citing the release notes: The plug-in offers many capabilities to workflow developers, such as: Invoking unmodified scripts by copying and pasting them into workflows Invoking external scripts and passing workflow parameters as script inputs Generating a new Orchestrator action from a PowerShell script Generating a new Orchestrator action for a PowerCLI cmdlet Browsing snap-ins and their associated cmdlets in the Orchestrator workflow editor Invoking scripts from the Orchestrator JavaScript API Converting vCenter Server objects in Orchestrator workflows to PowerShell objects and the reverse The VMware vCenter Orchestrator plug-in for Microsoft Windows PowerShell 1.

If you are booting your ESXi servers from the network using vSphere Auto Deploy then this plug-in allows you to automate tasks for configuring and provisioning stateless ESXi hosts. The plug-in exposes an inventory and CRUD opratons for: ESXi depots Host profiles Rule sets There are workflows to manage answer files and to reprovision a host using answer files, host profiles, new image. For more information check the VMware vCenter Orchestrator Plug-In for vSphere Auto Deployrelease notes, documentation and download

If you ever wanted to integrate your workflows with a database with having your database records available as part of the inventory then this plug-in will help you to do so. Chances are that at some point you will need to read or write information from an SQL database as part of your workflows. vCenter Orchestrator provides some scripter / developper capabilities such as the JDBC plug-in and the integration with the hybernate framework.

VCE, the company formed by Cisco and EMC with investments from VMware and Intel is showing a demonstration of their vCenter Orchestrator powered infrastructure provisioning for vCloud Director. This is done with using EMC Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM) which is the single pane of glass managing the stand alone Vblock Element Management applications. If you followed the vCenter Orchestrator plug-in releases you must have noticed the UCS Manager release. So, how is a UIM plug-in different ?

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.

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.

Action Name (Action Count: 250)Action DescriptionReturn TypeModule Name updateAdminCatalog vCloud:AdminCatalog com.vmware.library.vCloud.Admin.Catalog createAdminCatalog vCloud:AdminCatalog com.vmware.library.vCloud.Admin.Catalog publishAdminCatalog vCloud:AdminCatalog com.vmware.library.vCloud.Admin.Catalog deleteAdminCatalog void com.vmware.library.vCloud.Admin.Catalog composeRoutingKey string com.vmware.library.vCloud.Admin.Extension.Notifications configureBlockingTasks void com.vmware.library.vCloud.Admin.Extension.Notifications setupAmqpBroker void com.vmware.library.vCloud.Admin.Extension.Notifications enableNotifications void com.vmware.library.vCloud.Admin.Extension.Notifications createImportVmIntoExistingVAppParams Any com.vmware.library.vCloud.Admin.Extension.VIM Server updateVimServer vCloud:Task com.