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VMworld Europe 2011 starts this Monday, there are some Orchestrator related sessions:

There are also some labs with vCO involved:

• HOL01 Building Your Hybrid Cloud
• HOL02 Managing Your Hybrid Cloud
• HOL03 Reporting on Your Hybrid Cloud
• HOL18 Core Platform – Performance & Scalability: Storage Optimizations

And you can find people from VMware’s Orchestrator team at the VMware Booth in the exhibition (ask for them, twice if necessary, they are there!!!  ).

Some 3rd-party vendors also might show their integrations in Orchestrator: Netapp, EMC, VCE, Infoblox, F5 Networks, Radware…

Looking forward to meet you in Copenhagen! 😎

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:

• Cloud Architecture Patterns
• Guidlines to Write Great Code Samples (@vCO-Documentation team: read this! :-P).

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”!

PowerShellInside released a new version 5 of their PowerShell Server. It brings new features…

• GSSAPI authentication (NTLM)
• Support for SSH Tunneling
• New Licensing Options – Easier to manage licensing based on the maximum number of connections.
• Upgraded FREE Personal Edition – Now with the ability to run as a service and on server operating systems.
• SCP Secure File Transfer

… and a new licensing model, based on concurrent connections.

This is really GREAT NEWS for the PowerSSHell-Plugin for vCO, because it provides fair licensing for the Orchestrator use-cases.

Impacts for the Plugin:

• The current version works well with PowerShell Server v5!
• New features of the server are not represented in the plugin yet.
• The FREE Personal Edition might fit for your needs now: Because it can run on a Server-OS, as Service, with no limitation to the logged-in user for some Use-Cases this is enough!

The new release adds a bunch of new ideas to the roadmap, so not only stay tuned, but participate on the discussion on http://getsatisfaction.com/vcoportal!

Meanwhile: I can provide you a 20%-Discount Voucher for PowerShell Server-Licenses! If you’re interested, contact me!

Besides all the great announcements at VMworld there was one small one interesting for people (or companies :-D) who integrate with vCenter Orchestrator: VMware plans to open a new marketing platform for Partners, called VMware Solution Exchange (VSX). This (maybe the successor of the Virtual Appliance Marketplace?) will also contain a section about “Partner Plugins” for VMware-Products, including vCenter Orchestrator. See the original post and a short presentation here…

So, additional to all the plugins released by VMware itself you can expect more and more 3rd-party vendors (including me 😎 ) to provide an integration in vCO.Uptime, Radware and Infoblox already published their plugins, more to come soon…