You may wonder what "Perspectives" application this may be orchestrating. In fact this plug-in offers a simple way for the VI administrator to give the vCO users access to specific workflows through a web interface.
Citing the official documentation:
"Perspectives is an Orchestrator Web view that allows a limited group of users to run or schedule certain tasks through a Web browser, without logging in to the Orchestrator client. vCenter administrators can use
If you think you have to be a development guru that knows programming languages in order to create functional workflows with vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) then think again! With hundreds of worfklows and actions to use as building blocks with a vanilla install of vCO, you can be on your way to creating workflows in no time. While it is true that JavaScript is used for the scriptable tasks within Orchestrator, you don't actually have to write any code for some simple, but functional, workflows.
Providing customized workflows to an internal or an external customer is a process following a typical software development lifecycle with specific orchestration requirements and best practices for setting up the environments and managing the content lifecycle.
1.1 Workflow Development life cycle
This section summarizes briefly the different steps to observe to deliver custom workflows (or any custom application).
1.1.1 Requirement gathering
Gathering requirement consists of interviewing the customer on project characteristics such as planning, budget, scope, prioritization and constraints but also particular specific technical requirements such as:
Ever wondered how your vCenter Orchestrator is doing on memory usage ? vCenter Orchestrator Java Virtual Machine allocates a default of 2 GB Heap space.
It will consume more heap space as processes are running and will ultimately call the garbage collector to keep in memory only the used items.
If you are running a lot of workflows on your server or if you are experimenting custom workflows and plug-ins you may want to know how much of this memory is consumed.
VMware released nine plug-ins for vCenter Orchestrator this year (and there is more than a quarter left !) and decided that it would be best for customers to have all of the docs gathered in one place in a more user friendly and searchable format.
vCenter Orchestrator Plug-ins Documentation Center allows from one single page to browse the different plug-ins documentation.
Also these documentation guides are also made available in .
VMware release a version 1.02 of the vCenter Orchestrator Plug-in for vCloud Director (1.0 or 1.01).
This is a maintenance release.
Quoting the release notes :
Version 1.0.2 of the vCloud Director plug-in improves the performance, addresses a number of issues, and includes the sample workflow package. To upgrade the plug-in, you must install version 1.0.2 on top of your existing installation.
It is recommended to update to this version since it corrects a problem happening when workflows waiting for a vCloud Director task are running concurrently and other issues.
Following their press-release and VMworld 2011 presentation Infoblox has now published a technical note which can help you to learn how the Infoblox VMware vCenter Orchestrator Plug-in alleviates the challenges of IP Address Management within rapidly expanding virtualized environments.
Quoting a part of the Tech Note:
The plug-in was developed for and is delivered with the VMware vCenter Orchestrator (vCO), which works in tandem with the VMware vCloud Director (vCD). The vCD provides automated IP addressing and related management capabilities in real time as virtual machines are created and destroyed.
vCenter Orchestrator 4.2 shipped with vCenter 5 including a vCenter 4.1 plug-in. While being usable with vCenter 5 it does not leverage the new functionality of vCenter 5. This has now being taken care of with the release of the vCenter 5 plug-in. Not only the plug-in exposes 100% of the vCenter 5 API it also provides a lot of additional workflows for networking and host configuration.
Some of these workflows include:
This SNMP plug-in allows vCenter Orchestrator to connect and receive information from Simple Network Management Protocol enabled systems.
In terms of capabilities the plug-ins allows to:
Register SNMP hosts, Add SNMP GET, GETNEXT and GETBULK queries to retrieve device from host MIBs (Management Information Base) using OIDs (Object Identifier): Running these workflows will add new items to the inventory.
Set policies to listen to trap events coming from SNMP hosts and to start remediation workflows
I am always asked why choose orchestration over scripting. The short answer is that orchestration has a lot more to offer; the long answer is below.
I started to work in IT in 1995 after getting my analyst-programmer degree. Naturally I used scripted automation right away and never stopped since then. I have used batch, shell, vbscript, kix, perl and various other scripting languages to automate desktop and server automated provisioning and operations in physical and then virtual environments in the early 2000s.
