Our friend @cody_bunch at ProfessionalVMware.com hosts an online VCAP Study session every other week. These "Brown Bag" sessions provide expert guidance and feedback on the night's topic. Our very own Burke Azbill recently participated on the panel for the vCenter Orchestrator Brown Bag session. If you happened to miss the session, don't worry - it was recorded and may be viewed here: VCAP-DCA BrownBag - Section 8 Orchestrator Follow-Up.
It has been a while without publishing a tutorial. With the growing activities around vCO the vCO team members have been very busy and doing such tutorials takes a lot of time. Since a lot of you already went through the basics we can now give you some code snippets that you can use in your own workflows. Here is the first one. I will eventually improve the article if people ask for it.
The vCO 4.01 and 4.1 administration and developer’s guides were recently updated with quite a few additions in the latest covering items such as
Running a workflow on a Selection of Objects Implement the “Start Workflows in a Series” and “Start Workflows in Parallel” workflows Running a workflow in a scripted loop scripting example Get these updated version from the VMware vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) Documentation page.
See the ‘Updated Information’ section in each guide for the full details of the additions.
If you wish vCO had additional plug-ins to orchestrate more technologies please comment with your top 5 wish list.
This is the 2nd part of the previous post Some tips for new vCO plug-in developers (I). These tips are more focused on the workflows than on the plug-in project itself.
Again I've grouped them by type.
Workflows & Actions
Start developing workflows as building blocks
A building block would be a simple workflow that requires some few input parameters and returns some simple output. If we have a rich (and good) set of building blocks it will be much easier to create higher-level workflows and we will offer the users a better set of tools to compose their own complex workflows.
Here is a small list of tips for those ones who start with the vCO plug-in development. Some of the tips are just some kind of advice that will help you to keep the things clear. Others may make you think about future and possible problems and how to face them up. And finally some other tips will be useful "just" to avoid simple (~ easy-to-fix) problems usually reported by the QA engineers before the final users.
vCO is shipped with a large library of actions and workflows for the most common vCenter operations. However since vCenter is extremely rich in terms of features and you may have been in the situation where there is no action or workflow for a given vCenter Operation. Thanks to vCO vCenter plug-in exposing the entire vCenter API as javascript objects and methods you can always explore its API documentation and craft your own actions and workflows.
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 :)
VMware Communities Roundtable
Title:#115 - VMware Orchestrator - Orchestrating the Cloud
Hello everyone! I just had a great interview with @Mike_Laverick of RTFM Education where we talked at length about VMware's vCenter Orchestrator! Keep an eye out for a new episode of "Chinwag with Mike" in a few weeks :)
And even sooner, I've just been requested to participate in today's VMware Communities Roundtable Podcast by @jtroyer. Be sure to stop by!
One final note: we have setup a Twitter account as you may have noticed here on our page.
We are proud to announce that vCO Team members and VMware KB TV today released vCO 4.1 installation and configuration videos. These videos were published on the excellent VMware KB blog and 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.
