You have now no more excuses for not using vCenter Orchestrator: you can now have it up and running in a few minutes. With the vCenter Orchestrator Virtual Appliance the configuration is now reduced to the bare minimum (on the Windows version there is quite a lot of configuration to do and important pre-requisites including a directory service and database). This is ideal for loading a vCO dev / test environment (including a mobile lab on your laptop) either by importing the provided OVF in vCenter or in Workstation or Fusion (For fusion you will need to use ovftool in command line).

  Here is yet another vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) plug-in. This time to enable a set of discovery and monitoring features. Citing the CIM plug-in summary page: ESX includes a CIM Object Manager (CIMOM) that implements a set of server discovery and monitoring features. With the VMware CIM SMASH/Server Management API, clients that use industry-standard protocols can do the following: Enumerate system resources Monitor system health data The plugin is general enough to support other CIM compliant services and is not limited only to ESX.

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.

  You may wonder what "Perspectives" application this may be orchestrating. In fact this plug-in offers a simple way for the VI administrator to give the vCO users access to specific workflows through a web interface. Citing the official documentation: "Perspectives is an Orchestrator Web view that allows a limited group of users to run or schedule certain tasks through a Web browser, without logging in to the Orchestrator client. vCenter administrators can use

If you think you have to be a development guru that knows programming languages in order to create functional workflows with vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) then think again! With hundreds of worfklows and actions to use as building blocks with a vanilla install of vCO, you can be on your way to creating workflows in no time. While it is true that JavaScript is used for the scriptable tasks within Orchestrator, you don't actually have to write any code for some simple, but functional, workflows.

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.

VMware released nine plug-ins for vCenter Orchestrator this year (and there is more than a quarter left !) and decided that it would be best for customers to have all of the docs gathered in one place in a more user friendly and searchable format. vCenter Orchestrator Plug-ins Documentation Center allows from one single page to browse the different plug-ins documentation. Also these documentation guides are also made available in .

VMware release a version 1.02 of the vCenter Orchestrator Plug-in for vCloud Director (1.0 or 1.01). This is a maintenance release. Quoting the release notes : Version 1.0.2 of the vCloud Director plug-in improves the performance, addresses a number of issues, and includes the sample workflow package. To upgrade the plug-in, you must install version 1.0.2 on top of your existing installation. It is recommended to update to this version since it corrects a problem happening when workflows waiting for a vCloud Director task are running concurrently and other issues.