orchestrator

Using vRealize Orchestreator MP in vROps Product Version - vRealize Operations 7.x and 8.x A few years ago VMware released the Orchestrator MP which is a superb way to directly call vRO workflows from vROps by way of alerts and actions. This opens the door to all manner of ideas for conditional automation using vROps. The limitation Recently for a customer we planned to use the vRO MP to assist a customer with a very unique/niche challenge.

I already have a vRealize Orchestrator workflow to shutdown my workload cluster. What I want to do is trigger that by a voice command from Alexa. Now, the correct and proper thing to do here would be to create a new Alexa skill, write the function in Lambda and connect that to my Orchestrator REST API and execute the workflow. That way I could control the “intents” and “utterances” and have verbal feedback.

The new Event Broker service in vRA7 is one of the most exciting features of this latest release, the possibilities for extensibility are huge. At this point it time you can still use the old method of using workflow stubs to customise machine lifecycle events, but at some point in the future this will be deprecated and the Event Broker will be the only way to extend. With this in mind, I wanted to use the Event Broker to do something that I am asked on almost every customer engagement - custom hostnames beyond what the Machine Prefixes mechanism can do.

@vaficionado) – if that list of names doesn’t fill you with confidence for vRA.Next, then I suggest you follow them on twitter and trust me that it’s a crack team! So, my highlights: Completely automated deployment…almost. The deployment of appliances and installation of IaaS components and pre-requisites will be wizard driven, the Window Servers will need to exist and have an agent installed, and the MSSQL server will also need to be installed.

As a PowerShell fan I find using the vCO PowerShell plugin makes my life a whole lot easier. What isn’t easy however, is the configuration of vCO and a PowerShell jump host. Having done it a few times, this is my method for ensuring a secure working connection using HTTPS and Kerberos. Configure the Orchestrator Appliance Since we’re planning on using Kerberos authentication, we’d better ensure that the time is correct AND syncs to the same source as the domain.

In my previous post Backing up ESXi 5.5 host configurations with vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) – Workflow design walkthrough I showed how to create a workflow to back up host configurations, but it was limited to one host at a time. For this post I’m going to show how to create a new workflow that calls the previous one on multiple hosts using a ForEach loop to run it against each one.

As a little learning project, I thought I’d take on Simon’s previous post about backing up ESXi configurations and extend it to vCenter Orchestrator (vCO), and document how I go about building up a workflow. I’m learning more and more about vCO all the time, but I found it has a really steep entry point, and finding use cases is hard if you haven’t explored capabilities. The steps I want to create in this post are: