With this release vCenter Orchestrator is extending his reach in the automation of the cloud infrastructure with managing the physical infrastructure supporting it. For those that do not know yet it is installed as part of vCenter (starting with version 4.0) and usable at no additional cost. It is the only Orchestrator platform supporting full functionality of vCenter and vCloud Director. With the release of the Cisco UCS Manager the end to end provisioning of physical resources - virtual infrastructure - multi-tenant cloud Organizations, virtual Datacenters, vApps is now possible.
VMware now has a formal home at VMware blogosphere to communicate about vCenter Orchestrator.
You can expect upcoming posts from the vCO product, engineering and professional services teams.
Check the welcome article and make sure to subscribe to the RSS feed.
This article is the first tutorial covering a practical use of the recently released VMware vCloud Director plug-in. It is meant to be educational rather than exhaustive.
A while ago I wanted to make a copy of a running vCloud director vApp. When you use the vCloud Director user interface as an Organization Administrator you have the following options:
Copy operations are grayed out.
While there is certainly a very good reason for not supporting copy of running vApps I wanted to explore this further with leveraging the vCloud API through the vCenter Orchestrator plug-in for vCD.
These days I had a strange scenario in a large customer environment. Every time I tried to start a workflow via SOAP from a webservice client there was an error. After regarding this in the vCO client I found out that every run from the external webservice client causes the action "getAllVMs" to fail. Disconcertingly the array "VMs" wasn´t filled by the action and there was no error message.
The error occurs later in the workflow because of the empty array.
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 :)
For the vCO portion of the discussion, we had Burke Azbill and John Stanford from VMware's Cloud Services team!
VMware Communities Roundtable
Title:#130 - vCloud Connector and other delights
Be sure to visit the VMware Communities Roundtable where VMware experts talk about virtualization live every Wednesday at noon California time.
Hello all, it looks like we have Burke Azbill participating in this week’s VMware Communities Roundtable (Episode #130) Podcast by @jtroyer. Be sure to stop by! The session will be discussing
vCloud Connector and other delights, including that new Plug-in that allows vCenter Orchestrator to work with vCloud Director!
We are proud to announce that vCO Team members and VMware KB TV have released the "How to install and configure VMware vCenter Orchestrator Plug-in for vCloud Director" video. This video is published on the excellent VMware KB blog and the 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.
Today VMware released the most complete automation solution for vCloud Director as a free download !
This is a plug-in for vCenter Orchestrator allowing to orchestrate vCloud Director (and not the other way around, vCD 1.01 does not have the ability to start an external process).
In terms of functionality the plug-in allows:
Tenants to automate catalogs and vApp provisioning and decommissioning operations within their organization.
Service providers to automate the configuration and management of the tenant organizations, their virtual data centers and their resources.
Yesterday, vCenter Orchestrator 4.1.1 was released as part of vCenter 4.1 Update 1. This is mainly a bug fix release.
According to the release notes the resolved issues are:
Parent permissions are not propagated to a child object
Orchestrator Configuration might not export or import the license configuration
"Remove Snapshot" and "Add host to cluster" workflow incorrect behavior
Inconsistencies in library workflow names
XML encoding
Also the SSHSession object was improved with new functionality.
vCO Team is delighted to see vCenter Orchestrator knowledge being spread around the world. One of the VMware partners, Mightycare has a few vCO specialists who not only do a great job delivering automation and orchestration to VMware customers but also share their knowledge online. Here is a collection of the last code snippets they have published.
Use and examples of RegExp (regular expression)
Get all Distributed Virtual Switches vCO
Unzip Files with VMware Orchestrator workflow vCO
Access to Java Classes
SOAP connect via VB .
