Running commands or scripts in VM guest is something that has been done with vCO for quite a while using different mechanisms. A popular way was to use the VIX plug-in for vCO. This plug-in is not needed anymore since the VIX functionality is part of the vCenter API since vCenter 5.0 and there are guest operations workflows to copy a script and run it into a VM guest OS since vCO 5.

vCenter Orchestrator references workflows by ID and allows to have multiple workflows with the same name. If the workflows you are calling have a unique name you can write a vCO wrapper to find a workflow by name with the following code. Input: wfName (string) Output: wfByName (Workflow) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 var workflows = Server.findAllForType("Workflow", "c.name='"+wfName+"'"); var wfByName = null; if (workflows !

When working with new integrations that utilize the vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) REST API you may want additional logging on the vCO side to see what is happening. I came across this need on a recent project. By default, vCO is logging workflow and webview activities but not API calls. This short article walks you through the steps necessary to enable such logging. The following steps will enable additional logging on your vCO server.

vCloud Automation Center is the VMware hybrid cloud self-service provisioning portal. It can be customized to extend its OOTB functionality. The following tutorial shows how from the vSphere web client create a menu operation to run a program in a guest or how to do it automatically once the VM has been provisioned. This does not involve any scripting ! Prerequisites vCenter Orchestrator configured with: vCenter plug-in (with the same host used in vCAC) vCAC plug-in 5.

vCloud Automation Center has several constructs such as blueprints, business groups, reservations to manage the virtual machines lifecycle and governance policies. While most customers will use vCloud Automation Center out of the box some have several use cases for automation and integration. This is where vCenter Orchestrator comes into the picture. The vCloud Automation Center Infrastructure as a service data model (vCAC IaaS) vCAC IaaS has an extensible model consisting of different metamodels.

It seems everyday the interest in vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) is growing. I love this because it brings more and more use cases to our attention. One such use case is the need to call vCO workflows via its REST API. In order to keep this article generic, but useful, I will work with the free RESTClient plug-in/add-on for Firefox as the client. The general process here will be similar to what you may need to do from your software or portal to integrate with vCO’s REST API.

On a recent project, I was having trouble figuring out why invoking a SOAP operation kept failing with the vCO SOAP plug-in. The inputs I was providing appeared to be correct and worked just fine with soapUI. This short tutorial will teach you how to use the SOAPInterceptor to display the Header and Body that the SOAP plug-in is sending. SOAP Operation Auto-Generated Workflow A typical Invoke Operation workflow looks similar to the above image.

A vCO workflow wrapper is a set of workflow tasks that are added at the beginning of a workflow in order to take string values and look up a more complex data type or pre-defining inputs using attributes. You may have done these in the past already in vCO. Some examples would be finding a virtual machine by name or finding an Active Directory user by email address. If you’re running the vCO workflow from within the vCO client or vSphere web client, you probably don’t need to worry about this as both of those tools understand the complex data types that come with plugins.

VMware announced vCenter Orchestrator 5.5 : a major release including a lot of important new features. No more excuses to not orchestrate ! And here is the list ! vSphere 5.5 integration vCenter Orchestrator is a component of vSphere 5.5. As such it is automatically installed and configured as part of the vCenter Windows based installation. vCO & vCenter are integrated using Single Sign On. In the vSphere 5.

PERL Logo The goal of this tutorial is to create a simple workflow with a single string input that will be passed to a locally hosted Perl script for execution. The results of the script will be returned to vCO and stored in the workflow output. This could come in handy if you have existing systems that already have Perl based management scripts and you wish to incorporate their automation into your Orchestration policies.