VMware just released another new vCenter Orchestrator plug-in. The AMQP plug-in.
Quoting part of the release notes:
The VMware vCenter Orchestrator AMQP plug-in allows organizations to automatically trigger workflows based on AMQP messages. Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) is a highly-scalable publish and subscribe message protocol that is increasingly used in cloud architectures. It is the default messaging protocol for vCloud Director 1.5. With the AMQP plug-in, organizations can define policies that automatically trigger specific workflows based on certain AMQP messages.
A common task among vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) developers is to check the results of workflows that have already executed. This can be done in the vCO Client by clicking the plus sign next to the Workflow you are checking on, but this isn't always the most desirable method. For instance, you may have a vCO Policy/Task setup to check the executions of other workflows at a recurring interval. The following code can help guide you to gathering the desired information.
Last week I was member of a roundtable for designing SAP application delivery. The main things they discussed about were VM templates and their clones. SAP has an own application abstraction layer (ACC - adaptive computing controller) which hosts an API. With this knowledge I designed a little whiteboard workflow with the vCenter Orchestrator as clone intelligence and automation instance for future release management.
As you can see the software delivery application could be every other deployment system (HP Radia, Altiris etc.
Brian Knudtson (@bknudtson) talks about new VMware vCenter Orchestrator plug-ins and the vCenter Converter 5.0 beta.
Listen to the podcast here.
If you develop workflows chances are that the plug-ins documentation is a very valuable resource for you. The VMware documentation team has written a short questionnaire about what is helpful or not in the existing guides and what you would like to see covered further. Please take a few minutes to answer here.
With the new released SOAP/REST plug-in you can automate everything you ever dreamed of! One of my favorite use cases is to automate the VMware Lab Manager operations with the SOAP plug-in. As many of you know the Lab Manager offers 2 API´s: an external and an internal one. The following examples are based on the internal API (https://YourLabManagerServer/LabManager/SOAP/LabmanagerInternal.asmx). This use case shows how to establish the VMware LabManager SOAP connection, create an new configuration, adding a template-based VM to the configuration, deploy the configuration and change the owner of the configuration.
VMware has released a Service Manager Integration Platform connector allowing Service Manager to leverage vCenter Orchestrator.
First a little product introduction:
VMware Service Manager is a configurable ITIL platform featuring service desk, automated configuration and change management, IT asset management, self-service and request fulfillment. As part of the service request it supports a configurable portal using high-level business workflow modeling for approvals, notifications and tasks integration.
VMware vCenter Orchestrator is a technical Orchestration authoring platform part of vCenter Server allowing System Engineers to automate repetitive tasks requiring little to no human intervention by creating workflows leveraging extensive integrations with VMware and third parties cloud components.
Today a major milestone has been achieved for vCenter Orchestrator.VMware released not one but two very useful plug-ins adapter:
SOAP is a protocol used to implement a web service typically used over HTTP and in combination with a service catalog (Web Service Description Language - WSDL pronounced wisdel). Examples of applications using SOAP are vCenter, vCenter Orchestrator, Lab Manager
REST is the technology behind the World Wide Web, leveraging HTTP verbs and URI to define resources and operations with stateless connections.
If you ever wanted to start a workflow based on a VM triggering an alarm in vCenter the solution is a few click away.
The following action get all VMs that triggered alarms from any vCenter vCO is managing with filtering on Alarms names, acknowledged state, start time, status (warning, alert).
First go to the action tab. Right click on the root to create a new action module. Use the naming convention org.
If you thought vCO was powerful, think again. The new SOAP and REST plug-in are taking it to new levels. With the following tutorial you can in as little as 30 minutes and without a single line of code (yes really !) create a workflow that will update your Twitter status. If you never had a chance to do a vCO Tutorial this one is really an easy one for starting.
