vCloud Director 5.1 has some new features, one of them allows to keep vApp Templates information that are by default discarded. My colleague William Lam covers this very well in this article. If you think this would be good to have this functionality as a workflow then you can have it in about 5 minutes with creating it on your own. First thing is there is no out of the box workflow that download a lossless vApp Template but there is one to download a vApp Template.

Setting metadata on vCloud Director objects is a convenient way to extend their properties with whatever information you need to attach to these. This is very useful to include information on the object lifecycle or to reference other objects. For example I like to reference the vApp Template a vApp was issued from with adding a "vAppTemplateReference" metadata. Another use of the metadata is that you can search for these using the query service.

If you were at VMworld, during Steve Herrod (VMware CTO) session you could answer in real time to some questions. One of them was Over the next 3 years, how do you plan to manage your hardware infrastructure for your VMware environment ? Primarily from: vCenter : 62% A converged hardware management tool: 32 % Existing element management tools: 6% It is a good thing most of you want to, it is even better that the vSphere 5.

The VMware vCloud suite was made available a few hours ago. While most of its components have been bumped only by a dot one it supports a LOT of new features including two major items : The new vSphere Web client : The single pane of glass user interface on which you can extend functionality on your own by running your own custom workflows automating and integrating VMware and third party applications.

VMware has just made available its Orchestration plug-in leveraging vCloud Director 5.1 latest and greatest features. This is the most complete automation solution for vCloud Director and is a free download ! To put things in perspective the 1.0 version of the plug-in was released months after vCloud Director 1.0, the 1.5 release weeks after vCloud Director 1.5, the 5.1 version is released together with vCloud Director 5.1. Kudos to the VMware engineering team who have automated the plug-in build process so much that the plug-in could accomodate the changes in pre-release vCloud Director version so quickly.

As part of the Cloud Infrastructure and Management Center of Excellence Team who worked on this project we are glad to announce the release of the new vCloud Architecture Toolkit. Amongst many enhancements, this version covers vCenter Orchestrator best practices that have been proven in real-world enterprise and service provider cloud deployments. It also includes a Workflow examples implementation guide and its workflows. Quoting the vCAT page: The VMware vCloud Architecture Toolkit (vCAT) is a set of reference documents designed to help you construct a superior working cloud solution leveraging current technologies, recommended practices and innovative tools that have been proven in real-world enterprises.

VMware released the most important upgrade of vCenter Orchestrator. vCenter Orchestrator 5.1 is providing important enhancements geared towards the end user. vCenter Orchestrator, formely VMO (VMware Orchestrator) and (VS-O) Dunes Virtual Service Orchestrator) was packaged as part of vCenter Server since vSphere4. As part of this was a rebranding effort and an exhaustive vCenter plug-in synched with the vCenter server release. A year later the 4.1 version brought in scalability with moving to a 64 Bits JVM, performance improvements and reliabilty improvements.

This vCenter Configuration Manager workflow package includes vCenter Orchestrator workflows for managing vSphere Virtual Machines and templates.These are sample workflows for illustrating Configuration Manager’s ability to perform Operating System patching, configuration compliance, Software Provisioning and OS Provisioning.These workflows are compatible with vCenter Orchestrator Rest Plug-in version 1.0.1 and later. This is version 2.0 of the package. It contains: Enhancements and Bug fixes in the original (version 1) workflows New workflows to automate OS provisioning and Windows Software distribution functions New workflow package and associated documents can be downloaded from here

It has just been announced on the VMware Orchestrator communities, several plug-ins have been updated with some critical updates, some new requested features and some minor fixes. Quoting the communities post: vCO-Powershell-Plug-in -1.0.1 - kerberos support added vCO-SQL-Plug-in -1.1.0 - two related plugins combined with auto-generation as well as advanced SQL scripts. A few important issues fixed. vCO-vCenter-Plug-in - 5.0.1.1 - Critical update. Fixes a major issue with performance and losing attributes value.

Quoting the release notes: The VMware vCenter Orchestrator plug-in for vShield allows vShield administrators to simplify the management of their vShield infrastructure by extending the robust workflow automation platform of VMware to the vShield environment. These workflows are built using the drag-and-drop capability of the workflow editor in the Orchestrator client. vCenter Orchestrator uses the plug-in to access the functionality of vShield and the vShield APIs. The included, pre-built workflows simplify the process to get you started with custom workflow creation.