vCO

VMworld 2012 Session (OPS-CIM1274)

Looks like I will be speaking at VMworld on a panel session with Thomas Corfmat, Igor Stoyanov, Sean Harrison, and Vivienne Cleveland:

In this session you will find out why vCenter Orchestrator is no longer VMware’s ‘best kept secret’. This session will walk you through the capabilities of vCenter Orchestrator and show how you can leverage this fundamental and powerful capability to integrate the VMware Cloud Infrastructure Suite with the rest of your systems management portfolio. This session will include a content rich demonstration of how the capabilities and features of VCO greatly simplify the installation, development and execution of workflows. Finally we highlight a range of use cases and the broad and ever growing portfolio of VCO plug-ins that allow you to quickly and easily build comprehensive cloud service offerings.
It is definitely an honor to have been asked to sit on the panel for something that I feel so strongly about.  I hope that everyone will be able to take some time out of their busy schedules to come join us at the session!  Hope to see everyone there!

VMworld 2012 Session Voting

So this year I have a couple of topics that I and a couple of others (Cody Bunch, Joerg Lew) have turned into for the Call for Papers.  User voting for the topics has opened (here) and we would appreciate your help in getting these sessions selected.  Here are the sessions:

1347 – vCenter Orchestrator for the Everyday Administrator – Join Cody Bunch, author of “Automating vSphere with vCenter Orchestrator,” along with James Bowling as they take you through the basics of orchestrating your vSphere infrastructure with vSphere vCenter Orchestrator.
1638 – Building a Self-Service Portal for Your IT-Services with vCenter Orchestrator & Wavemaker – This session shows you how to build a web-based self-service portal for your users / customers, based on VMware vCenter Orchestrator. You will learn how to customize workflows and present them via a Web-UI to the users.  Joerg and James will also share stories from acutal projects in the field with a lot of best-practices and lessons learned.  NO CODING REQUIRED! (Both Orchestrator and Wavemaker allow drag-and-drop styled implementation…)

I know that I would definitely appreciate your vote for the above sessions!  Also, don’t forget to vote for the many other great sessions that have been turned in.  There are way too many to list but you can go see for yourself!

vCO 101 – Test DPM

In response to Cody Bunch‘s recent post on Testing DPM with PowerCLI, I decided to translate this into a vCO workflow.  I did this because I thought it would be fun.  The workflow is relatively simple and does the following:

    • Allows user to select the host.
    • Checks the current power state of the host.
    • Based on the above, runs through either the standby tasks or the power on tasks.
    • Logs if successful and fails with exception if not.

Instead of making this a lengthy post, I have attached the workflow for you to download if you want to see it or play with it.  Enjoy!

Test DPM vCO Workflow

 

 

Renaming a datastore through vCO

I was in need of automatically renaming a generic datastore name in one of my host deployment workflows and found that the renameDatastore() method was deprecated (Thanks Jörg!) and that we are to use rename_Task().  The rename_Task() method is one that takes any manageable object.  Here is an exert from the API reference:

Rename_Task

Renames this managed entity.

Any % (percent) character used in this name parameter must be escaped, unless it is used to start an escape sequence. Clients may also escape any other characters in this name parameter.
See name

Required Privileges
When object is VirtualMachine - VirtualMachine.Config.Rename
When object is Datacenter - Datacenter.Rename
When object is Folder - Folder.Rename
When object is VirtualApp - VApp.Rename
When object is ResourcePool - Resource.RenamePool
When object is ClusterComputeResource - Host.Inventory.RenameCluster
When object is DistributedVirtualSwitch - DVSwitch.Modify
When object is DistributedVirtualPortgroup - DVPortgroup.Modify
When object is Datastore - Datastore.Rename
When object is Network - System.Read

So I implemented the following code into a new scriptable task within my workflow:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
var hostDatastoreSystem = VcPlugin.toManagedObject( host, host.configManager.datastoreSystem );

// Rename datastore on host matching Datastore
for each (var datastore in hostDatastoreSystem.datastore) {
if(datastore.name == "Datastore"){
datastore.rename_Task("newDsName");
System.log("Changing datastore name to "+newDsName);
}

Another thing I realized was that the API explorer within vCO is not always as forthcoming with information so a word to the wise, always check the API reference (http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/topic/com.vmware.wssdk.apiref.doc_50/right-pane.html) for more detailed information.

1 2 3  Scroll to top