Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
required to get the same results. Additional sample Perl scripts can be found on vMA at /usr/
lib/vmware-vcli/apps/ and /usr/share/doc/vmware-vcli/samples/.
Automating with vCenter Orchestrator
vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) is VMware's process automation tool that comes bundled with vCen-
ter Server. During vCenter Server installations, you may have noticed the inclusion of the vCenter
Orchestrator service and installed i les. While it is installed by default, it is still up to the adminis-
trator to coni gure vCO for use with vCenter Server. We'll go over that coni guration later in this
chapter. If you are able to use vCenter's Simple Install, the bulk of vCO coni gurations are done
automatically.
Throughout its evolution vCenter Orchestrator has become an integral component of vCloud
Director (vCD) and vCloud Automation Center (vCAC). Conversely though, independent adop-
tion of this tool has been relatively light in comparison to PowerCLI or vMA. In our experience
this in large part is due to a couple of factors:
vSphere administrators are not yet adopting automation beyond small single-purpose
scripts.
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vSphere administrators i nd the implementation of tasks and requirements difi cult.
vSphere administrators i nd the interface foreign and overwhelming.
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No doubt you have seen or heard of vCenter Orchestrator but were probably unclear of how
it i t into the vSphere ecosystem.
A few things are unique about vCenter Orchestrator:
The ability of the workl ow engine to manage many simultaneous processes. It's also able
to track and manage pauses or interruptions in the workl ow, such as approvals or service
restart.
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Integration into the vSphere Web Client.
Open for development of new plug-ins.
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New Features in vCenter Orchestrator 5.5
VMware expanded the importance of vCenter Orchestrator as part of vCAC with the release of
vSphere v5.1. In vSphere 5.5, its extends vCO by including the following features:
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Workl ow Debugger. Provides a debug mode that workl ow developers can use to rerun
their workl ows and better troubleshoot.
vCO Cluster Mode. Provides dynamic scale-up and scale-down of orchestration when
used with an external load balancer. This provides application high availability, allowing a
workl ow to be completed by a different vCO node in the event of a node outage.
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Security improvements.
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Improved integration with vSphere Web Client.
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