We are proud to announce that vCO Team members and VMware labs today released a vCO (4.1) VIX plug-in for the VIX API version 1.10. If you wonder what VIX is here is an extract of the VIX landing page: "The VIX API allows you to write programs and scripts that automate virtual machine operations, as well as the guests within virtual machines. This API is high-level, easy to use, and practical for both script writers and application programmers.

VMware's vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) ships with a rich library of workflows and actions. The workflows are often designed to handle a single object instance such as a VM. Technical workflows frequently require selecting several VMs by VM folder, resource pool, or by one of their properties (power state, Operating System, Hardware version ...). Some of our readers have asked how to deal with selecting VMs for a mass operation workflow. This article should cover the basis required to do so.

Have you ever tried opening a VMware Lifecycle Manager (LCM) report.xml file with Excel? Probably didn't have much luck, right? The following brief tutorial will walk you through the steps necessary to make these reports generate XML files that can be opened by Excel (Disclaimer: I did my tests with Excel 2007.) Please click the Read More link to see the rest of this article. Finding the Report Workflows and Editing them To get started, you will need to launch your vCenter Orchestrator Client.

Creating webviews can be a daunting task. Your best bet to get started is by downloading the vCenter Orchestrator Developer's guide and going to page 298. Then, follow the step-by-step instructions on how to Create a Simple Web View Using the Default Template. The guide provides a wealth of information around the technology used in vCO webviews as well as sample usage and syntax. In addition to the resource mentioned above, we recently published part 3 in our series on a self service provisioning portal that includes step by step details on creating a webview.

VMware has announced a few days ago that LCM is End of Life. Please check the FAQ for more details. For those of you not familiar with it, VMware Lifecycle Manager is a workflow based application running on top of vCenter Orchestrator. vCenter Orchestrator is not impacted by the LCM EOA.

We have been communicated today that there was a change in the vCO 4.1 release notes since our original vCenter Orchestrator 4.1 release article. The web-views, while still being supported in vCO 4.1 were listed as deprecated. The release notes have been updated and the web views are not in the deprecated features list anymore. We can now assume this functionality will still be supported in the next major release of vCO.

Hey everyone I just got back to the hotel after a nice 13 hour day at VMworld! I'm working labs 11-15 and am Co-Presenting the Orchestrating the Cloud session Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Today's session from 3pm-4pm had over 130 people checked in and felt like it went pretty well. The session was intended to be discussion heavy around using VMware vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) to to perform cloud automation. As such, we presented a short series of 3 videos that highlight the usage of an upcoming vCO plug-in for VMware vCloud Director!

The recently released vCenter Orchestrator 4.1 requires and takes advantage of a 64-bit OS. For development purposes, it can be desirable to have a single server to perform the following roles: Windows Domain Controller (Active Directory) E-mail Server (POP3/SMTP) Database Server vCenter Server vCO Server vCO Client This short article is intended to help you get all these services running on a single server. Setting up these features in an incorrect order may result in conflicting ports and/or the inability to get some of the software installed.

Lifecycle Manager 1.2 has just been posted on VMware's website. This release requires the new vCenter Orchestrator 4.1 so it runs on a 64-bit Operating system. Additionally, there is finally support for some of the new vSphere features that were not previously available for Lifecycle Manager users including: Thin Provisioning VMXNET3 Network Adapters vNetwork Distributed Switch Cisco Nexus 1000V support Windows 7 Guest OS Customization IE8 and Firefox 3.6.x support If you're Lifecycle Manager (LCM) deployment has been customized, you'll most likely need to re-implement the customization if you wish to migrate to the new 1.

Yes, it is that time of year again. VMworld 2010 is nearly upon us! And, yes, Orchestrator will have a few sessions available for your education :) Currently listed are 3 sessions: VMware vCenter Orchestrator - Orchestrating the Cloud (Advanced Lab Tutorials) Lab: VMware vCenter Orchestrator (Hands-on Lab) Saving Time with vCenter Orchestrator (Breakout Session) Lab: VMware vCenter Orchestrator This 1 hour hands-on lab will provide you with an introduction to vCO 4.