See our presentation at VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas about Workflow Development Best Practices…:
Link: http://portal.sliderocket.com/vcoportal/WorkflowDevelopment
Download the Audio-Recording: tex2923.mp3 (ca. 24 MB)
In August I released the first technical preview of my PowerSSHell-Plugin for vCO, which allows you to run Powershell-Commands directly from within workflows.
For the next version (release date: soon :mrgreen:) I plan following updates:
Support for Queueing Powershell-Commands to a certain server and maintaining a single connection (this fits to the updated Personal License for the necessary PowerShell Server)
For more information and the download óf the current version, visit http://www.vcoportal.de/powersshell-plugin/
If you have some further ideas, feature requests or found some bugs, join the discussion on http://getsatisfaction.com/vcoportal!
If you need to buy some powershell-inside licences, contact me for a discount voucher!
VMware Labs published the Perspectives Plugin for vCO. It allows you to provide a webinterface for users to start and monitor Workflows. It is quite flexible, you can define different “perspectives” (list of workflows) for different user groups. And the best: All of this can be done without programming any single line of HTML/JavaScript-Code (The setup itself is again done by Workflows).
To download the Perspectives Plugin:
http://labs.vmware.com/flings/perspectives-plug-in-for-vcenter-orchestrator
The Documentation:
http://labs.vmware.com/download/141/
For a further description and configuration example:
http://www.vcoteam.info/newsflash/vmware-labs-released-the-perspectives-plug-in.html
http://www.vcoteam.info/learn-vco/getting-started-with-perspectives-webview.html
To get an overview which Perspectives you already have created and which Workflows are provided in each, go to the Inventory-Tab of your vCO-(Smart-)Client to get a nice tree-view:
Be aware, that (as all Flings from VMware Labs) the Plugin is under Technical Preview License and therefore not supported.
For other alternatives to provide users a webbased interface to the Orchestrator, read this discussion…
In his Blog post “Moving on…” Steve Jin (@sjin2008), vSphere API Wizard, author of THE book about vSphere API, creator of the opensource vSphere Toolkit for Java, announced that he has left VMware to “explore new opportunities”.
Steve did a great job evangelizing the API, and published really cool stuff on his blog which helps people to get-started and to dig-deep into the API. His blog also contains a lot of good read besides the deep coding stuff, my personal favourites:
I will continue to recommend his book to everybody who wants to automate vSphere, regardless which toolkit or programming language you use (among other things because it’s the only public source for UML-charts of the vSphere API data model (@vSphere API-Documentation team: read this! :-P) ).
Steve, thank you very much for all the help and the nice chats! Good luck for the future, and enjoy your “new super fast desktop”!
Preparing a “Getting Started Guide” for vCO I stumbled over a real pearl which cannot wait to be tested:
www.codecademy.com provides a free, self-paced online training for JavaScript starters. It teaches you the basics of JavaScript, like Variables, if-clauses and loops, in small lectures.
If you create an account (optional), the system remember your progress.
So, if you’re new to JavaScript, Codecademy is a quick way to get started!
Steve Jin: VMware VI and vSphere SDK
Steve Jin ( www.doublecloud.org ) focus is on the VI Java Toolkit. However the books also includes a great general introduction of the vSphere API and lots of UML-diagrams of the API data model. Both is very useful when you develop vCO scripts interacting with vCenters
see also
http://www.amazon.com/VMware-VI-vSphere-SDK-Infrastructure/dp/0137153635
David Flanagan: JavaScript – The Definitive Guide
Since all the scripting elements are written in JavaScript, you need at least one book with a JavaScript-reference on your desk.
(Of course, you can find examples all over the web, but in most cases searching in the internet costs more time and distracts more than simply open the reference book on the marked site 
).
see also
http://www.amazon.com/JavaScript-Definitive-Guide-David-Flanagan/dp/0596101996
Marijn Haverbeke: Eloquent JavaScript
If you are new to JavaScript, most of the books about it out there are do not fit for an vCO-guy because they contain too much web-related stuff.
An exceptional introduction to JavaScript NOT focussing on the web-stuff is "Eloquent JavaScript". The book is really good to read, and best of all: There is an online version available on http://eloquentjavascript.net which contains an interactive JavaScript console. So you can directly test the code examples online in your browser while you read:
The fastest way to learn JavaScript from scratch!
see also
http://www.amazon.com/Eloquent-JavaScript-Modern-Introduction-Programming/dp/1593272820
Cody Bunch: Automating vSphere: With VMware vCenter Orchestrator
http://www.amazon.com/Automating-vSphere-VMware-vCenter-Orchestrator/dp/0321799917
