Workflow Name (Workflow Count: 138)Workflow DescriptionWorkflow Category Change the number of CPUs CPU Add a catalog Adds a catalog to an organization. Catalog Update a catalog Updates a catalog. Catalog Delete a catalog Deletes a catalog. Catalog Share a catalog Updates the sharing configuration of a catalog. Catalog Publish a catalog Publishes or unpublishes a catalog to all organizations external to the catalog's organization.

I will re-iterate what I have said about nine months ago : Today VMware released the most complete automation solution for vCloud Director as a free download ! This is a plug-in for vCenter Orchestrator allowing to orchestrate vCloud Director 1.5 with a large collection of out of the box workflows. The previous version of this plug-in (1.02) is used at several service providers and enterprise customers. As before in terms of functionality the plug-in allows:

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.

If you are in EMEA and would like to be trained on using vCenter Orchestrator to create custom workflows here is your chance. VMware is providing not one but 10 instructor lead training classes in EMEA in the next months ! I can attest the training content is really good since I have given this training recently. Also the EMEA trainer is the person who developped the content and has several years of experience with implementing vCO solutions at enterprise customers.

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.

vFabric Application Performance Manager is VMware solution for cloud applications performance monitoring and remediation. This is a nice solution for monitoring throughput, latency, hit rate and error rates, it provides code level diagnostics and a nice user interface to fix problems quickly.The automation expert reading here certainly expect more and will be pleased to know it also offer built-in automation and policy-based alerting and remediation. If you go on the product page features you can see that this is the kind of flexible remediation we want to see in such a product:

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.

EMC released a Compute as a Service white paper documenting design considerations leveraging vCenter Orchestrator and its vCloud Director, AMQP and REST plug-in With these components EMC created a workflow running the following operations: Provision storage from EMC Symmetrix VMAX or EMC VNX based on the vCenter High Availability cluster. Create the datastore. Create the provider virtual datacenter. Create the organization virtual datacenter within the provider virtual datacenter. Create the catalog on the organization datacenter The whitepaper shows the workflow design, a simple custom web portal to start it and the workflow execution record.