It is a pleasure for me to write these lines as an introduction to a full series of articles, posted on vcoportal over the next couple of days:
Christian Strijbos (you remember his posts about WaveMaker and vs. LDAP a couple of weeks ago!?) put together a comprehensive project involving vCenter Orchestrator (and its SQL Plugin) and WaveMaker:
***…drumroll…***
The LittleCMDB
***…drumroll…***
Features
The LittleCMDB is a Workflow-driven Database Application which stores information of Virtual Machine configurations in a SQL database. The user can see the configuration via a web-based UI. It’s even possible to file a Request to change the configuration of a VM via the Web-Frontend, it will automatically processed and the settings of the VM will be adjusted.
In short, you can…:
- Show the current Virtual Machine configuration in a Web-Frontend
- Initialize the Database automatically
- Refresh the Database when the configuration of a Virtual Machine changes
- Let the users change the Virtual Machine configuration via a Web-Frontend
Architecture
LittleCMDB uses Orchestrator Workflows to implement the “business logic” of the application. For that it leverages the SQL-Plugin for vCO, so you don’t have to write a single line of SQL Statements.
There will be some backend Workflows which gather information from vCenter and store them into the Database.
The web-based frontend is built with VMware WaveMaker.
What you get:
We will publish a full guide how-to build the LittleCMDB from scratch, separated in different parts over the next couple of days (see the picture above also as a “Table of Content”).
We will also provide the Workflow Packages and the WaveMaker project to download.
Our main goal is to give you…
- examples and “hands-on” guides to develop workflows in vCO
- same for WaveMaker
- an example how easy it is to create such a “CMDB application” using vCO Plugins
- ideas to use vCO and WaveMaker for your own use-cases
So: Even if the downloadable workflows should run quite out-of-the-box, do NOT use them for production!
The complete project is for educational purposes only.
(If you like the idea, and want something like that for your company, engage Christian for a project! 8-))
Now, get your vCO Lab ready and look forward to Part 1…
…tomorrow in this Theater :mrgreen:!
Here we go:
Part 1:
http://www.vcoportal.de/2012/07/little-cmdb-part1/
Part 2:
http://www.vcoportal.de/2012/07/littlecmdb-an-orchestrator-and-wavemaker-project-part-2/
Part 3:
http://www.vcoportal.de/2012/07/little-cmdb-part3/
Part 4:
http://www.vcoportal.de/2012/07/little-cmdb-part4/
Part 5:
http://www.vcoportal.de/2012/07/littlecmdb-part-5/
Part 6:
http://www.vcoportal.de/2012/08/littlecmdb-an-orchestrator-and-wavemaker-project-part-6/
Part 7:
http://www.vcoportal.de/2012/08/littlecmdb-an-orchestrator-and-wavemaker-project-part-7/