If you develop workflows chances are that the plug-ins documentation is a very valuable resource for you. The VMware documentation team has written a short questionnaire about what is helpful or not in the existing guides and what you would like to see covered further. Please take a few minutes to answer here.

With the new released SOAP/REST plug-in you can automate everything you ever dreamed of! One of my favorite use cases is to automate the VMware Lab Manager operations with the SOAP plug-in. As many of you know the Lab Manager offers 2 API´s: an external and an internal one. The following examples are based on the internal API (https://YourLabManagerServer/LabManager/SOAP/LabmanagerInternal.asmx). This use case shows how to establish the VMware LabManager SOAP connection, create an new configuration, adding a template-based VM to the configuration, deploy the configuration and change the owner of the configuration.

VMware has released a Service Manager Integration Platform connector allowing Service Manager to leverage vCenter Orchestrator. First a little product introduction: VMware Service Manager is a configurable ITIL platform featuring service desk, automated configuration and change management, IT asset management, self-service and request fulfillment. As part of the service request it supports a configurable portal using high-level business workflow modeling for approvals, notifications and tasks integration. VMware vCenter Orchestrator is a technical Orchestration authoring platform part of vCenter Server allowing System Engineers to automate repetitive tasks requiring little to no human intervention by creating workflows leveraging extensive integrations with VMware and third parties cloud components.

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.

If you ever wanted to start a workflow based on a VM triggering an alarm in vCenter the solution is a few click away. The following action get all VMs that triggered alarms from any vCenter vCO is managing with filtering on Alarms names, acknowledged state, start time, status (warning, alert). First go to the action tab. Right click on the root to create a new action module. Use the naming convention org.

If you thought vCO was powerful, think again. The new SOAP and REST plug-in are taking it to new levels. With the following tutorial you can in as little as 30 minutes and without a single line of code (yes really !) create a workflow that will update your Twitter status. If you never had a chance to do a vCO Tutorial this one is really an easy one for starting.

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.

One thing vCO users and administrators always ask for is changing the boot order for virtual machines. The bad news is: It is part of the BIOS of the virtual machine (.nvram). But based on this community discussion and the solutions in PowerShell, I decided to test it with the vCenter Orchestrator and I was surprised how easy it is! 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 var changedValue = new Array(); changedValue[0] = new VcOptionValue(); changedValue[0].

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.

One of our colleagues, Christian Johannsen has posted a new article on the VMware vCenter Orchestrator blog onhow to automatically create a customized VM in Virtual Center and import it in vCloud director.