Wireless access is a bit patchy between the different conference
halls but over here in the Grand Auditorium I have access to the Press
network so I can do some live blogging again. While the (live) comment
is in the title the post will get updated on the fly.
In this session we get an overview of what vCenter Orchestrator does
and how it can assist with automation and orchestration. There are a
lot of things that can be automated in a virtual environment.
Orchestrator works with workflows. It has a workflow engine to make
these processes and it comes with a number of standard workflows built
it.
Orchestrator is also able to integrate with third party change
management systems so changes can be scheduled and automatically
handled, closed and documented results. It can also communicate with
multiple vCenter servers so you only have to configure it once for your
whole environment.
There are three parts to orchestrator:
- Workflow Engine, this can react to scripts, scheduling, event triggers etc.
- User Interface
- Workflow Client, this is where you manage your workflows
Orchestrator is built on Java and will support future software
versions of virtual infrastructure. Multiple database management
systems are supported (Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL) and it will come with
an open API.
One thing I didn’t know is that LifeCycle Manager is a VMware Orchestrator ‘enabled’ application.
There are a lot of different use cases for Orchestrator. A lot of
things that can be automated with Powershell scripting can be automated
through Orchestrator so there may be a question about what the use is
for Orchestrator. It could be valid for a specific organization to ask
the question “should I buy this technology or build it myself?”.
That is always something to think about but all the functionality
that is already in the product will make that decision easy I think. It
is interesting however that Powershell integration is not available
*right now*.
Projected release date is 1H09.
Update: I had a chance to ask the presenter about the status of
Powershell integration and he commented there is a lot of work being
done to integrate this into the product but that it necessitated a
partial redesign or re-architecture of the application. According to
him it is not a question of if but a question of when they will be able
to get this done.
