A few days ago vCenter Orchestrator 4.2 was released as part of vSphere 5 and as previous releases for no extra cost. This release focus is on bug fixing and improving documentation and providing it in different formats. 2011 effort was mostly on orchestrating more technologies with releasing a lot more plug-ins (7 listed as of now). Resources: vCenter Orchestrator 4.2 release notesvCenter Orchestrator 4.2 documentationvCenter Orchestrator 4.2 download (included in vCenter Server 5.

As part of the Cloud Infrastructure and Management Center of Excellence Team who worked on this project we are glad to announce the release of the new vCloud Architecture Toolkit. Amongst many enhancements, this version covers vCenter Orchestrator best practices that have been proven in real-world enterprise and service provider cloud deployments. Official announcement: On Monday August 29, 2011 VMware is releasing version 2.0 of the VMware vCloud Architecture Tookit (vCAT).

VMware vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) keeps your last workflows inputs as long as you keep your vCO client open. It is very practical since it avoids filling all the input fields on each subsequent run of the same workflow. Now if you close your client you have to refill these inputs except if ... You use the following tip: When your input are filled. Hold Alt and right click, A contextual menu appear.

VMware released a software development kit allowing the creation of plug-in adapters for vCenter Orchestrator.  For the company having development resources it means that they can develop plug-ins for their private usage or for the 200.000+ vCenter customers. For end users this translates into the future availability of a lot more plug-ins. Quoting the SDK page: The VMware vCenter Orchestrator Plug-in SDK 4.2 is designed to jumpstart developers who are new to vCO plug-in development.

With the increasing popularity of VMware vCenter Orchestrator, there is a growing desire to use it over SSL connections. While vCO supports this type of connectivity out of the box, it is not necessarily pre-configured automatically to have a proper SSL certificate. Regardless of how or where you import the default certificate, you are unlikely to get away from warnings such as: Firefox Warning: Internet Explorer Warning: After clicking "Continue to this website (not recommended).

VMware just released another new vCenter Orchestrator plug-in. The AMQP plug-in. Quoting part of the release notes: The VMware vCenter Orchestrator AMQP plug-in allows organizations to automatically trigger workflows based on AMQP messages. Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) is a highly-scalable publish and subscribe message protocol that is increasingly used in cloud architectures. It is the default messaging protocol for vCloud Director 1.5. With the AMQP plug-in, organizations can define policies that automatically trigger specific workflows based on certain AMQP messages.

A common task among vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) developers is to check the results of workflows that have already executed. This can be done in the vCO Client by clicking the plus sign next to the Workflow you are checking on, but this isn't always the most desirable method. For instance, you may have a vCO Policy/Task setup to check the executions of other workflows at a recurring interval. The following code can help guide you to gathering the desired information.

Last week I was member of a roundtable for designing SAP application delivery. The main things they discussed about were VM templates and their clones. SAP has an own application abstraction layer (ACC - adaptive computing controller) which hosts an API. With this knowledge I designed a little whiteboard workflow with the vCenter Orchestrator as clone intelligence and automation instance for future release management. As you can see the software delivery application could be every other deployment system (HP Radia, Altiris etc.

Radware is one of the few VMware partners leveraging extensively vCenter Orchestrator in combination with their products. Find below a demo video presenting the integrated solution. Quoting their site: This short demo walks through a sample workflow scenario to illustrate how Radware’s solutions can help you maintain tight integration between your virtual/physical ADC environment and VMware vCenter Orchestrator/vSphere. In just a few easy steps you can dynamically configure, provision, load balance, and monitor your virtualized environment.

Brian Knudtson (@bknudtson) talks about new VMware vCenter Orchestrator plug-ins and the vCenter Converter 5.0 beta. Listen to the podcast here.