Here is a small list of tips for those ones who start with the vCO plug-in development. Some of the tips are just some kind of advice that will help you to keep the things clear. Others may make you think about future and possible problems and how to face them up. And finally some other tips will be useful "just" to avoid simple (~ easy-to-fix) problems usually reported by the QA engineers before the final users.

vCO is shipped with a large library of actions and workflows for the most common vCenter operations. However since vCenter is extremely rich in terms of features and you may have been in the situation where there is no action or workflow for a given vCenter Operation. Thanks to vCO vCenter plug-in exposing the entire vCenter API as javascript objects and methods you can always explore its API documentation and craft your own actions and workflows.

No worries if you missed the live broadcast. It is available below. We had a very active session for just under an hour. Hope you enjoy(ed) the show :) VMware Communities Roundtable Title:#115 - VMware Orchestrator - Orchestrating the Cloud

Hello everyone! I just had a great interview with @Mike_Laverick of RTFM Education where we talked at length about VMware's vCenter Orchestrator! Keep an eye out for a new episode of "Chinwag with Mike" in a few weeks :) And even sooner, I've just been requested to participate in today's VMware Communities Roundtable Podcast by @jtroyer. Be sure to stop by! One final note: we have setup a Twitter account as you may have noticed here on our page.

When scripting workflows in VMware vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) it is often desirable to read or write to local files on the vCO server whether this is a .conf, .txt, .cmd, .bat, .xml, or any other text file. In order to do so, you must be sure to either work with files in a pre-approved folder or add your custom folder to a configuration file. For full details on the following information, please see page 64 of the vCenter Orchestrator Administration guide, section "

We are proud to announce that vCO Team members and VMware KB TV today released vCO 4.1 installation and configuration videos. These videos were published on the excellent VMware KB blog and VMwareKB channel on youtube. We definitely recommend you to subscribe to these and to follow VMware KB on twitter. Thousands of visitors have consulted our installation and configuration articles in the last few months and these are the only articles getting more and more traffic week after week.

In part two of this series, you learned how to use a user interaction workflow element to allow for an approver to approve a server request. You also learned that a number of permissions are required throughout vCO in order for the approval to actually perform the server request. It is likely that you would have to modify permissions on several other workflows and actions throughout vCO in order for tutorial 2 to fully work for a non-admin account.

My friend Christian and I want to support vCO starter with basic examples and features in vCO. We often read in community and blogs "how can I do this...". So here are the first posts. Sorting array Functions Secure LDAP Mount a NFS datastore Setting DRS mode Just come back here to see the list continued and / or follow our blog. Regards, Andreas

Abhinav Joshi from NetApp has written a detailed article on what the orchestration demonstrations showcased during VMworld 2010 San Francisco. These were featuring vCenter Orchestrator 4.1 with the addition of: VMware vCloud Director vCO plug-in technical previewNetApp Provisioning Manager vCO plug-in technical previewNetApp FlexClone vCO plug-in technical previewAnd matching applications. Quoting the original article with the vCO demos: Demo 1: Automated and orchestrated provisioning of infrastructure resources and virtual datacenters in VMware vCloud Director

The following videos are a preview of the upcoming VMware vCloud Director vCO plug-in. Since its release with vCenter 4, the main vCO plug-in has been for vCenter by fully supporting its API and providing several technical workflows. vCloud Director is already becoming VMware's next major API and as such will be fully supported by a vCO plug-in. The demonstration below shows examples on how to take advantage of this new plug-in and benefit from vCO powered automation.