Welcome back, Perspectives! (or: How to provide webbased UI for vCO without programming?)

By
Joerg Lew
– October 10, 2011Posted in: Plugins, Webviews

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…