Did you miss the @PowerScripting folks as they interviewed the vCO Management Team?
If so, don't worry - the session was recorded! See below for details:
Thomas Corfmat - vCO Product Manager
Hemant Gaidhani - vCO Product Marketing Manager
with bonus commentary from one of VMware's PowerShell gurus: Alan Renouf
Learn more about vCO and the new support/integrations with PowerShell.
Links/Resources:
PowerScripting Blog Article: http://powerscripting.wordpress.com/2012/01/16/episode-172-vcenter-orchestrator/
Video: http://static.bambuser.com/r/player.swf?username=PowerScripting
PodCast: http://feeds.
If you are designing enterprise wide Orchestration you may need to consider more than a single instance of vCenter Orchestrator. The vCenter Orchestrator Multi-Node Plug-in can help you doing so with offering the ability of a vCenter Orchestrator server to remote control other vCenter Orchestrator servers.
What this plug-in provides is:
Publish the remote vCenter Orchestrator library elements (Configurations, Packgaesm Workflows, Actions and Resources) in the master vCenter Orchestrator inventory
Publish the remote vCenter Orchestrator inventory elements (vCenter, vCloud Director, Microsoft AD, Cisco UCS, .
If you have an investment in PowerShell cmdlets such as VMware vSphere PowerCLI but also snapins from other vendors the VMware vCenter Orchestrator plug-in for Microsoft Windows PowerShell can help you to integrate these as part of workflows steps in vCenter Orchestrator.
Citing the release notes:
The plug-in offers many capabilities to workflow developers, such as:
Invoking unmodified scripts by copying and pasting them into workflows
Invoking external scripts and passing workflow parameters as script inputs
Generating a new Orchestrator action from a PowerShell script
Generating a new Orchestrator action for a PowerCLI cmdlet
Browsing snap-ins and their associated cmdlets in the Orchestrator workflow editor
Invoking scripts from the Orchestrator JavaScript API
Converting vCenter Server objects in Orchestrator workflows to PowerShell objects and the reverse
The VMware vCenter Orchestrator plug-in for Microsoft Windows PowerShell 1.
If you are booting your ESXi servers from the network using vSphere Auto Deploy then this plug-in allows you to automate tasks for configuring and provisioning stateless ESXi hosts.
The plug-in exposes an inventory and CRUD opratons for:
ESXi depots
Host profiles
Rule sets
There are workflows to manage answer files and to reprovision a host using answer files, host profiles, new image.
For more information check the VMware vCenter Orchestrator Plug-In for vSphere Auto Deployrelease notes, documentation and download
If you ever wanted to integrate your workflows with a database with having your database records available as part of the inventory then this plug-in will help you to do so.
Chances are that at some point you will need to read or write information from an SQL database as part of your workflows. vCenter Orchestrator provides some scripter / developper capabilities such as the JDBC plug-in and the integration with the hybernate framework.
VCE, the company formed by Cisco and EMC with investments from VMware and Intel is showing a demonstration of their vCenter Orchestrator powered infrastructure provisioning for vCloud Director. This is done with using EMC Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM) which is the single pane of glass managing the stand alone Vblock Element Management applications.
If you followed the vCenter Orchestrator plug-in releases you must have noticed the UCS Manager release. So, how is a UIM plug-in different ?
My team and I have helped customers to build private and public clouds using vCenter Orchestrator for the last 5 years. Adding vCloud Director in the picture tremendously helps with providing customers a scalable standardized cloud solution. Most people will think at orchestration as a single entry point on top of the cloud when in fact for several use cases it is recommended to have vCloud Director and vCenter Orchestrator running side by side.
The vCenter Orchestrator plug-ins are coming with a lot of built in workflows and action scripts. The first thing to do when looking for functionality is to browse the library or use the search filter to find these.
If you do not get exactly what you are looking for, there are chances that some of the existing workflows and actions will contain close enough examples. If you do not find any of these you can still use the API explorer to create your own.
I will re-iterate what I have said about nine months ago : 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 1.5 with a large collection of out of the box workflows. The previous version of this plug-in (1.02) is used at several service providers and enterprise customers.
As before in terms of functionality the plug-in allows:
The vCO appliance makes it very easy to deploy vCenter Orchestrator in minutes. My colleague William Lam went a bit further with providing a script that let you pre-define a lot of the configuration settings.
The script leverage the OVF format to set a number of parameters such as the appliance network settings, placement on the virtual infrastructure datastores and network.
You can find out more about it here.
I am looking forward to see more vCO articles from William since he has a very successful VMware scripting blog with a lot of interesting articles.
