Introducing: The LittleCMDB (a vCenter Orchestrator & WaveMaker Demo-Project)

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-))