Discover Technology: VMware vCenter Orchestrator 5.5 Overview

vCenter Orchestrator is a powerful workflow tool to automate processes in your VMware vSphere infrastructure as well as with other third-party technologies (eg. SQL, Active Directory,…). Although vCenter Orchestrator license is packaged with your vCenter Server and can be used with no additional costs, a lot of people are probably not using it. Even they do not know that it exists.

It took me a long time, too, till I installed the vCO Appliance for the first time – but it is really a great tool, worth taking a closer look at. For example you can build very basic workflows to automate some every-day-tasks as eg. server provisioning, or even create extreme complex ones, with integration of Active Directory or SQL,… .

You can install vCO on a windows server, or you go the easy way and use the virtual appliance.

vCenter Orchestrator can run multiple parallel workflows

Workflow engine manages and monitors concurrent executions

Enables developers to concentrate on the tasks that the workflows perform, rather than on the workflow executions themselves

vCenter Orchestrator performs checkpointing

Workflow execution continues even after a hard restart of the vCenter Orchestrator service

Allows stable processes even when the vCenter Orchestrator server crashes

vCenter Orchestrator workflows can be interactive

Provides Graphical Development Workflow Environment (IDE)

~500 workflows and actions for vCenter Server and vCloud Director
Drag and drop actions
Conditional logic
Pause, wait until, counters
Exception handling
Version control
Role-based access control
And more

Improves Workflow Design Efficiency

Workflows are built mainly by reusing existing building blocks
Workflows
Actions
Resource elements
Predefined scriptable tasks