Jeremy Goodrum from NetApp has released the NetApp OnCommand Workflow Automation (WFA) package for vCenter Orchestrator. Also included are a How-to video for using the OnCommand Workflow Automation package for vCenter Orchestrator and a solution video for creating new Multi-Tenant vCloud Director environment using WFA and vCenter Orchestrator. Find more about this here.

Get Supported Hardware Schema Quite some time ago I had the need to retrieve the supported HW versions for an environment.. I don’t remember what the project was, but it wasn’t terribly important so I didn’t bother digging deeper to figure things out - I just worked around the issue. Last month William Lam posted an article on how to do this with PERL. In this article Which Virtual Hardware Versions (VM Compatibility) Are Supported In vSphere?

The people working on vCenter Orchestrator have created a page for it on Facebook. If you have a facebook account you can visit the page and click on like.

VMware released vCenter Orchestrator 5.1.1 As part of the vCenter 5.1 update 1. I rarely cover these updates on the blog since they are mostly bug fixes. This one is different since it includes some long due functionalities. I did ask for some of these and the dev team did an awesome job implementing them ! vCenter Orchestrator 5.1 provided a lot of new great features at the workflow designer level and integration with the vSphere web client I have detailed in this article.

Have you ever read the official vCenter Orchestrator documentation? If not, I strongly recommend you to check it out. On this page (http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/orchestrator_pubs.html), there is an information treasure of 7 (yes, seven!) guides, which are available in different formats, including mobi and epub, and contain information about every aspect of the Orchestrator configuration and interface. The only disadvantage of this amazing documentation set is the large number of pages, more than 500, which is the average size of a popular novel.

As vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) gains traction, so too does the need for details on how to extend it using vCenter Orchestrator (vCO). I have kept an eye out for good articles on vCAC and just saw a great one at the DailyHypervisor.com blog around Adding a computer account to Active Directory OU. This is something that we had done for LifeCycleManager (LCM) quite some time back and feel it is a good candidate for a vCO-centeric article.

The purpose of this article is to provide readers with instructions on how to give vCO the ability to read and write Microsoft Excel files (xls / xlsx). Yes, it is 2013 yet there are plenty of reasons why organizations might still be using an Excel spreadsheet instead of a database table.. We won't dwell on that here, instead we'll focus on providing those organizations with a step-by-step guide to provide such functionality to vCenter Orchestrator.

vCloud Director has a nice feature allowing to organize vApps into catalogs. If like me you need to replicate these catalog across organization or even different vCloud hosts you may find your solution here. I have written a solution to do it a long time ago but never had the time to release it publicly. It is now done and here are the features. Features This package comes with a rich set of features.

In a previous article I explained how we could extend vCloud Director with vCenter Orchestrator and then provided a full implementation. This was using the vCloud Director blocking tasks and notifications feature which allow to extend existing vCoud Director operations. vCloud Director 5.1 introduced a new feature called API extensions which basically allows a cloud provider to extend the vCloud Director API with custom services with leveraging VMware or third party applications.

VMware education has released a series of vCenter Orchestrator instructional videos. These short instructional videos, between 5 and 20 minutes in length and presented by VMware Senior Technical Trainer Brian Watrous, cover the following topics: Introducing vCenter Orchestrator Overview : Introduction of the features and benefits of vCenter Orchestrator. Introducing vCenter Orchestrator Demo : This video demonstrates using a vCenter Orchestrator workflow to gather information. Installing and Configuring vCenter Orchestrator : This video covers the different ways to install and configure vCenter Orchestrator.