If you are in EMEA and would like to be trained on using vCenter Orchestrator to create custom workflows here is your chance.
VMware is providing not one but 10 instructor lead training classes in EMEA in the next months !
I can attest the training content is really good since I have given this training recently. Also the EMEA trainer is the person who developped the content and has several years of experience with implementing vCO solutions at enterprise customers.
vFabric Application Performance Manager is VMware solution for cloud applications performance monitoring and remediation.
This is a nice solution for monitoring throughput, latency, hit rate and error rates, it provides code level diagnostics and a nice user interface to fix problems quickly.The automation expert reading here certainly expect more and will be pleased to know it also offer built-in automation and policy-based alerting and remediation.
If you go on the product page features you can see that this is the kind of flexible remediation we want to see in such a product:
vCenter Orchestrator uses a powerful log service. This article explains the basics of this service and possible configuration changes.
This article will identify the log files currently in use for a typical vCO server installation. Additionally, it will address the following areas of interest:
Server Log rollover control: MaxFileSize and MaxBackupIndex
Enable REST call logging in the vCloud Director Plug-in
Enable logging to a SYSLOG server
Setting the server and all components to debug mode
The vCenter Orchestrator application server log files are located in install_directory\app- server\server\vmo\log
One of our contributing authors, Sergio Sanchez, has just published a three-part video series on Developing your first VMware vCO Workflow. In this series, Sergio steps you through the process of creating a new workflow to power on a VM and send e-mail from scratch. A couple library actions, a decision box, scriptable tasks, and error handling will be used throughout the series. The actions taken during this video series will be common across nearly all custom workflow development you perform in the future so it serves as a great basis to get you started.
Need vCO to fetch some data from a database for integration purposes ? There is an easy solution with creating a plug-in ...
Jöerg Lew wrote an excellent article on the different options to integrate vCO with a database here. Creating a hibernate based plug-in is definitely the best way to map a database as vCO objects but it is a lot of effort and can get quite complex.
Since there is another much simpler way to create a database plug-in (with read only rights on the database) I thought I should share it.
EMC released a Compute as a Service white paper documenting design considerations leveraging vCenter Orchestrator and its vCloud Director, AMQP and REST plug-in
With these components EMC created a workflow running the following operations:
Provision storage from EMC Symmetrix VMAX or EMC VNX based on the vCenter High Availability cluster.
Create the datastore.
Create the provider virtual datacenter.
Create the organization virtual datacenter within the provider virtual datacenter.
Create the catalog on the organization datacenter
The whitepaper shows the workflow design, a simple custom web portal to start it and the workflow execution record.
You have now no more excuses for not using vCenter Orchestrator: you can now have it up and running in a few minutes.
With the vCenter Orchestrator Virtual Appliance the configuration is now reduced to the bare minimum (on the Windows version there is quite a lot of configuration to do and important pre-requisites including a directory service and database).
This is ideal for loading a vCO dev / test environment (including a mobile lab on your laptop) either by importing the provided OVF in vCenter or in Workstation or Fusion (For fusion you will need to use ovftool in command line).
Here is yet another vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) plug-in. This time to enable a set of discovery and monitoring features.
Citing the CIM plug-in summary page:
ESX includes a CIM Object Manager (CIMOM) that implements a set of server discovery and monitoring features. With the VMware CIM SMASH/Server Management API, clients that use industry-standard protocols can do the following:
Enumerate system resources
Monitor system health data
The plugin is general enough to support other CIM compliant services and is not limited only to ESX.
Getting started with Perspectives Webview
If you have been following VMware vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) for a while, it is likely that you have already seen the Perspectives webview in action. It has been used in one or more vCO demos as a web-based interface to launch a specific set of workflows. A web-based interface for launching workflows is a common requirement in organizations and likely a more secure method.
What is Perspectives?
In some use cases you may want to customize the name of the workflow run/execution to suit your needs. For example it may be more practical to browse the workflow runs with having the name of the object the operation ran on such as "Deploy vApp tcWebServer" instead of the default "Deploy vApp". It can also be usefull if you use the workflow run as a way to identify a particular one from an external application having an ID for it.
