About Author: Joerg Lew

Posts by Joerg Lew

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Secret(?) #vCO Tips for #VMworld 2012

By
Joerg Lew
– August 23, 2012Posted in: Uncategorized

VMworld 2012 is coming (in fact, I’m writing this post on the plane to San Francisco  😎 ).

This year there will be a lot of great content about the Orchestrator, see this article on the official VMware Orchestrator Blog:
http://blogs.vmware.com/orchestrator/tag/vmworld-vco-vcenter-orchestrator-orchestration-breakout-sessions-plug-ins-vmware-f5-networks-infoblox-radware-vce-emc

About and in addition to these promising sessions, I have some “secret” special tips for you:

The #vBrownBag TechTalks

In the Communites/Blogger Lounge a bunch of lightning talks will be hosted, including some sessions about vCO:

See the complete agenda and the scheduling here:
http://www.virtualnetworkdesign.com/2012/08/20/techtalks-powered-by-vbrownbags-the-topics/
http://www.vmworld.com/docs/DOC-6032

Sorry, but not everybody can go to San Francisco!

<placeholder for a joke about flowers in your hair />

Great news for you: You can watch the sessions live and in color online  on http://livestream.com/vmwarecommunitytv

OPS-CSM1379 – Extending vCloud Director

No vCloud Director extension whithout vCO! I got word that you will learn how to provide “Availability as a Service” with vCD, RabbitMQ and vCO in this session.
…including some brand-new never-published-before stuff….

OPS-CIM1274 – Building Cloud Services using VMware vCenter Orchestrator

I want to highlight this session, because: It is a Panel Session, Thomas Corfmat and Igor Stoyanov from VMware discuss and demonstrate Orchestrator use-cases with Sean Harrison (Nothrop Grumman), Vivienne Cleveland (FedEx Services) and James Bowling (iland Cloud Infrastructure).
This high-class cast promises great real-world stories about vCO!

Solution Exchange

More and more vendors present plugins for vCO… Ask them all about their integration with Orchestrator!
(In the past this was hard business, but if you keep asking, you will get to the proper person for a demo….)

Party (and everywhere else)

To qoute from the official Orchestrator Blog:
”
And as you roam the convention floors, be on the lookout for orchestration gurus like Burke Azbill, James Bowling, Cody Bunch, Bill Call, Christophe Decanini, Chris Knowles, Thomas Kraus, Savina Ilieva, William Lam, Joerg Lew and Igor Stoyanov.

Let’s see who can snap the most pictures with these workflow jedis… ;-)

“

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Adventures with the vCO AMQP Plugin

By
Joerg Lew
– August 17, 2012Posted in: Examples, Get Started!, Integrate vCO

*** This is a Guest Article, written by Mathew Quinn – Thanks, Mat! ***

Having had some experience with a variety of plugins for vCO that range in quality, I was wondering what to expect from the AMQP plugin. I approached the plugin with a good deal of skepticism – which did turn out to be completely unfair!

Having had no prior experience with message queues, my first task was to learn about all things queue.

Selecting RabbitMQ to experiment with was the obvious choice. I believe VMware now own this product which can be used in a free edition or as part of the larger vFabric suite. The Plugin also comes with a little rabbit icon, so I’m guessing this is what they’re suggesting. The plugin can however work with any AMQP-based message broker.

Now there were some AMQP concepts to learn, which turned out to be very simple and well presented. I would recommend a read through the following documentation if you are new to AMQP or RabbitMQ: http://www.rabbitmq.com/tutorials/amqp-concepts.html

Next I provisioned a CentOS 6 VM and installed RabbitMQ which was ridiculously easy. In order to get moving faster, I also installed the RabbitMQ management plugin that presents a convenient web interface where you can define exchanges, queues and bindings, and also publish and retrieve messages.

Get Started with AMQP in vCenter Orchestrator

Installation of the AMQP plugin for vCO was easy so I’ll skip that part. It installs the same as any other Plugin for vCO.

Upon installation, some new workflows are now present in the vCO Client

Right, very straightforward. There appeared everything I needed to get started.

A good place to start is running the ‘Add a Broker’ workflow which adds a broker (AMQP server) to the vCO inventory. This is the root object from the point of view of the plugin’s inventory. Once you have a broker in your inventory you’re free to begin receiving and publishing messages, which works quite nicely.

On the AMQP Broker I added a queue called ‘Inbox’ and a queue called ‘Outbox’, the intention being to both receive a message in vCO, and publish a message back.

And published a message to the inbox, ready to receive.

Now the moment of anticipation. Will this work first go? I run the ‘Receive a text message’ workflow in vCO client.

Presto! Success! My message has been received in the vCO client perfectly. I’m starting to like this.

Now let’s send a message back to the outbox.

The workflow runs successfully, and looking at the broker, there is indeed a message sitting in the queue to be fetched.

Nice! The reply was received successfully too. Already things are starting to look very nice indeed.
Now to step things up a notch. What I’m really interested in with the AMQP plugin are the event-driven possibilities. I want to be able to trigger a workflow from an inbox message, do some processing, and respond to the outbox.

Event-driven Message Handling

Rather than reinvent the wheel, I decided to check online for examples of just this operation and stumbled across some workflows published on the subject:
http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-18002
The example was focused around handling vCloud Director message notifications. I imported the package and took a look.

The author achieves this by utilising a policy connected to an AMQP subscription that triggers a scripting event. When a message arrives in the queue that is subscribed to, the event fires and the script runs. Neat.

The script that runs operates by firing up a workflow – but this is where things start to get messy.

Oh no – is that a hard coded workflow ID in the script? It sure is. If beings greater than myself have found that this is the best way to do things, we’re in trouble. I just can’t do things like this when coding and enterprise-grade solution.

Investigating policies a bit further, it turns out that it is possible to directly trigger a workflow from an event rather than run a script. I decide to give this a try.

Firstly I must create a subscription to my inbox queue, and workflow that I intend to run. Subscriptions are for the sole intent of receiving messages from a queue and they live in the vCO inventory. You can create one by running the ‘Subscribe to queues’ workflow.

I also create an empty workflow to trigger on receiving a message. Now I have all the components I need to build my policy.

This is all well and good, but I need some input to my workflow. I want the workflow to be able to inspect the message received. I create a new parameter to the workflow of type ‘Any’.

Now to hook this up to the policy. I will gloss over the details a bit here but, suffice to say, I found passing in the ‘self’ object of type AMQP:Subscription the most reliable way to get all the details of the message received and, additionally, the subscription that received the message, into the workflow using only one input. The other possible inputs, event key headers, properties, and body, achieve this only in part, and with varying degrees of success.

In the workflow itself, I add a scripting object to log the message, and nest a ‘Send text message’ workflow to reply to the outbox.

Now I am all ready for the big test. I should be able to send a message to the inbox queue, Orchestrator will log this, and send a reply to the outbox. With the policy started, I send a message to the inbox.

Fantastic, I can see the message body logged in the workflow run.

And the reply is present in the outbox queue!


In Summary, the vCO AMQP plugin offers an exciting range of possibilities. It interfaces simply and reliably with AMQP Brokers and could be used for a variety of purposes.

References

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

By
Joerg Lew
– July 17, 2012Posted in: Call Workflows from outside, Database, Examples, Get Started!, Integrate vCO, vCO Use-Cases, Wavemaker

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/

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Regular Expression-Objects in vCO Scripts

By
Joerg Lew
– July 12, 2012Posted in: Examples

Recently there was a great discussion on the forums about how to match Workflow input parameters against a Regular Expression: http://communities.vmware.com/message/2064306 (make sure to read through the complete thread to get Christophe’s (www.vcoteam.info) examples!)

Create RegExp Objects

Regular Expressions are used in JavaScript as objects of type ‘RegExp’. You can create them explicitly via constructor new RegExp() or directly with /pattern/modifiers-syntax:

//using the constructor
//new RegExp(pattern, modifiers);
var ipPattern= new RegExp("^((25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|[0-9]{1,2})\.){3}(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|[0-9]{1,2})$");

//Or, to save a bit of typing, JavaScript provides a simpler syntax;
//var pattern = /pattern/modifiers;
var ipPattern= /^((25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|[0-9]{1,2})\.){3}(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|[0-9]{1,2})$/;

(you might remember that from the E4X-syntax for XML-handling: http://www.vcoportal.de/2011/03/xml-handling-the-e4x-way/)

Use RegExp Objects

var ipPattern= /^((25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|[0-9]{1,2})\.){3}(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|[0-9]{1,2})$/;
// as parameter for String-methods
var ip = "192.168.1.1";
var isValidIp = (ip.match(ipPattern) != null);
System.debug('Is the String ' + ip + ' a valid IP-address? ' + isValidIp);

ip = "192.168.1.678";
isValidIp = (ip.match(ipPattern) != null);
System.debug('Is the String ' + ip + ' a valid IP-address? ' + isValidIp);

//with the RegExp-object's own methods exec(), test()...
var validation = /^(?:4[0-9]{12}(?:[0-9]{3})?|5[1-5][0-9]{14}|6(?:011|5[0-9][0-9])[0-9]{12}|3[47][0-9]{13}|3(?:0[0-5]|[68][0-9])[0-9]{11}|(?:2131|1800|35\d{3})\d{11})$/;
var creditCardNumber = "1234123412341234";
var isValidCreditCardNumber = validation.test(creditCardNumber); //returns a boolean
System.debug('isValidCreditCardNumber? :' + isValidCreditCardNumber);

(If you have a real world use case for the last example, let me know!  It’s on my todo-list next to an “How to integrate vCO with Paypal” article… :mrgreen:)

References

To feel the power of Regular Expressions (they even look very geeky  ;-)) visit:
http://www.w3schools.com/js/js_obj_regexp.asp
http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_obj_regexp.asp
http://www.regular-expressions.info/examples.html

To become a Wizard, read following books (and :-)### grow a beard):
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596520689
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596528124/

And, as final pro-tips for the use of String.search(regexp):

  • It returns a number with the position of the first match (there is a mistake in the vCO API Explorer!), and
  • -1 is not false in JavaScript!!!
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Orchestrator@VMworld2012

By
Joerg Lew
– June 6, 2012Posted in: Uncategorized

Summer’s coming, VMworld’s coming.  😎

This year there is a impressing number of sessions targeting vCenter Orchestrator available for public voting on http://www.vmworld.com/cfp.jspa

That means a great choice for to vote for you (and quite a competition for me  :mrgreen: )…

If you want to hear about how to create a self-service portal for your IT-Services leveraging vCO and Wavemaker, vote for Session 1638! Together with James Bowling (www.vsential.com) we will show you strategies to drag-and-drop develop a Wavemaker-based frontend for vCO Workflows. (As frequent reader of this blog you already might got some ideas  ;-))

In Session 1639 I will tell you something about using vCO as Integration Platform for your complete IT-Infrastructure. Based on real-life experiences I’ll show why and how you can use workflows to glue different systems together…

See you in San Francisco & Barcelona!