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German vCO Workshop and tutorial series available

In the current issue of the German “ix” magazin there is the first (of three) parts of a nice vCenter Orchestrator tutorial. Buy the issue in paper at your favorite newspaper store, or online (you can also just get the single article): http://www.heise.de/ix/inhalt/2013/9/112/

The authors of the article, Jens and Guido Söldner, are also teaching a two day instructor-led hands-on workshop focusing on vCO and vSphere automation These are taking place in Düsseldorf and Munich starting at Sept. 10th and Oct. 10th 2013.

Get details and book your place at http://www.amiando.com/vmworkshop2013.html

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Get your hands on vCO at VMworld 2013

 

VMworld 2013 is starting tomorrow in San Francisco, as usual providing a real bunch of Hands-on Labs you can get your fingers on all the products.

And of course there is a lot of vCenter Orchestrator stuff represented in these labs (hey, it’s becoming a more and more important component within the VMware vCloud Suite!):

And you can find vCO in quite a few breakout sessions this year:

So if you are attending VMworld this year, make sure to check out these sessions (live, or afterwards on www.vmworld.com)!

If you are not attending: Register yourself at http://hol.vmware.com and check the lab HOL-OPS 07 to get a guided introduction in vCO!

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Generate VMs based on load with vCO and vCAC

You do remember my video with the topic „Generate VMs based on actual load in a Resource Pool” (http://www.vcoportal.de/2012/11/generate-vms-based-on-actual-load-in-a-resource-pool/)?

In that video I showed a vCO workflow which provisioned new VMs when the load on a specific Resource Pools reached a defined Value. When the load was decreased, the VMs were thrown away. In this video, I worked on a simple vCenter Server base. A colleague of mine, Carsten Schäfer, took my Workflow and modified it to work with vCAC.  They changed the workflow so, that virtual machines will not provisioned as a “Single” VM, instead he used the add components function to deploy them to an existing Multi-Machine Service.

Oh yeah, one might call it some first PoC for auto-scaling in vCAC (yep, that’s just for the robots :mrgreen: )

Here is the video:

As I found great stuff 😉

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Application Onboarding with vCO and WaveMaker

Last month I had a customer, who wanted an onboarding process for his virtual machines. This onboarding should work as follow:
– There is a standard Linux template for all virtual machines
– The users can choose from a web site what machine type is required
– From the website a vCO workflow is started which clones the template and installed the required packages into the VM
– At the end the application configuration is done
To be honest, the customer requirements were quite simple so the usage of Puppet or Chef was not an option.
After everything the customer wanted was clear, I thought about the options and came to the idea to choose the vCO and WaveMaker for the solution.
I don’t like passwords in Workflows so the first think I did, was creating a vCO SSH Key. This could be done with a predefined workflow in vCO.

After I had my SSH public key, I created the Linux template with the public key in the file /root/.ssh/authorized_keys
You can do this manually or also use a predefined vCO Workflow

This allows me, to administer the Linux VM without the need for a password.
The next thing I did, was to create a folder on the vCO Appliance. I created the folder under the root directory with the name ConfigFiles. The vCO has a secure configuration so to allow the vCO Server to access this folder you must allow this explicit. For that, you have to edit the file: js-io-rights.conf on the vCO appliance this file is located under the path:

/opt/vmo/app-server/server/vmo/conf/js-io-rights.conf

I added my created path and after that, the file was looking like this:


-rwx /
+rwx /var/run/orchestrator
+rx ../../configuration/jetty/logs/
+rx ../server/vmo/log/
+rx ../bin/
+rx ./boot.properties
+rx ../server/vmo/conf/
+rx ../server/vmo/conf/plugins/
+rx ../server/vmo/deploy/vmo-server/vmo-ds.xml
+rx ../../apps/
+r ../../version.txt
+rw /ConfigFiles

After you have done this editing, you must restart the vCO Service to take the changes in effect.
For later use, I placed a file with the name “named.conf” into the folder. This file contains the configuration for the bind installation which I will use later in this Blog post.
For our Onboarding, we need the SCP workflow. With the predefined workflow, we have a little problem…..it doesn’t work with ssh Keys. So we have to modify the predefined workflow. Therefore we copy the existing workflow.

I called my workflow “SCP Put command with SSH Key”. After we have copied the workflow, we have to modify it.

We have to change the content in the SCP put file Scriptable task.

try{
var session = new SSHSession(hostName,username);

if(passwordAuthentication){
System.log("Connecting with password");
} else {
if(path == null || path == ""){
System.log("using default");
path = defaultKeyPairPath;
}
System.log("Connecting with key pair ("+path+")");
password = passphrase;
}

session.connectWithPasswordOrIdentity(passwordAuthentication,password,path);
System.log("Connected!");

session.putFile(localFile,remoteFile) ;
output = session.getOutput();
error = session.getError();
exitCode = session.exitCode;

System.log("Output: '"+output+"'");
System.log("Error: '"+error+"'");
System.log("Exit code: '"+exitCode+"'");

session.disconnect();

} catch (e) {
throw "Unable to execute command " + e;
}

After we have made the scripting changes, we need to add an Attribute. I choose defaultKeyPairPath as name. It is from type string and added as value ../server/vmo/conf/vco_key (the path to the vCO SSH Key).

On the input site of the workflow we have to add three Inputs. The first we have to create is passwordAuthentication from type boolean. As default value we choose no. The second Input variable is path from type path. The last one we need is passphrase from type SecureString. The last one is required, if we protect our SSH Key with a passphrase.

After we have created the SCP Put command with SSH Key it is time to build our workflow.
In this blog, we create a simple onboarding workflow to configure a Name Server with bind. The Template I use is a Cent-OS Minimal installation with installed VMwareTools and the SSH Public Key from the vCO Server.
I created a new Workflow with the name “Blog_Configure_DNS”.

In this workflow we go to the schema and add the following Workflows.
The first one is a Workflow with the name “Clone, Linux with single NIC” to clone the template. The second workflow we use is “Run SSH command”. The next one is our “SCP put command with SSH Key” and as last one we also use “Run SSH Command”.

Now we rename the commands. I rename the first “Run SSH….” to “Install named” the “SCP put command….” to “Put configuration named.conf” and the last Workflow to “Restart named”.

After the workflow design, you have to create the needed Attributes, In- and Outputs for every element. I did some examples in my “Little CMDB” series so if you are not familiar to create the needed parameter take a look here:

http://www.vcoportal.de/2012/07/introducing-the-littlecmdb-a-vcenter-orchestrator-wavemaker-demo-project/
and following.

When you’re finished with this, we have to build up the WaveMaker interface.
There are also a lot of good examples available to do this. You will find lot information here:
Using WaveMaker as Web-Fontend for vCO

http://www.vcoportal.de/2011/11/using-wavemaker-as-web-frontend-for-vco/

Off-topic(?): Lessons learned with WaveMaker
http://www.vcoportal.de/2012/02/lessons-learned-with-wavemaker/

Howto setup LDAP-Authentication for Wavemaker (Part 1 & Part2)
http://www.vcoportal.de/2012/05/howto-setup-ldap-authentication-for-wavemaker-part-1/

http://www.vcoportal.de/2012/07/introducing-the-littlecmdb-a-vcenter-orchestrator-wavemaker-demo-project/

To choose the right configuration, you can create a Drop Down field with different options. Here a Screen Shot for the DNS Server.

And here a Screen Shot for the DHCP Server with definition of the Scope.

Beside the option to use WaveMaker, you could also use an automatic provisioning depending on the actual load of a resource pool. I made an example video to show how it could be done with the vCO. You can find the video here:

http://www.vcoportal.de/2012/11/generate-vms-based-on-actual-load-in-a-resource-pool/
So have fun and orchestrate your virtual environment 😉

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NetApp OnCommand Workflow Automation package for vCO

Jeremy Goodrum (make sure to follow him on www.virtpirate.com and Twitter @virtpirate)  from NetApp has published a powerful package to integrate vCO and NetApp Workflow Automation:

https://communities.netapp.com/docs/DOC-25899

I “interviewed” Jeremy via email about his solution:

Can you introduce Netapp WFA in 2 sentences?
Jeremy –  OnCommand Workflow Automation (WFA) is NetApp’s automation framework that enables architects to create storage automation workflows and to integrate with third party SDK toolkits like VMware’s PowerCLI.  WFA gives NetApp storage administrators the ability to turn traditional scripts into full blown repeatable workflows that can intelligently provision and manage storage.

What drove you to build an integration of WFA and vCO?
Jeremy – I have had a lot customers tell me that they want to leverage vCenter Orchestrator as the orchestration portal, but needed storage automation as well.  People that have seen WFA’s intelligent storage placement and integration desired to add this to vCO’s already robust features.  We had this grand vision of vCO and WFA working together to build more than just traditional VMware Datastores.  We wanted to give vCO the ability to not only integrate with VMware environments, but also manage and provision NetApp storage .  Now vCO admins can build workflows that provision applications to use NetApp storage, manage CIFS home directories and even manage NetApp Snapshot backups.

When building the solution, what were your biggest challenges?
Jeremy – We wanted this to be simple to use and easy to drop in.  The big challenge was in trying to modularize the entire structure to allow end users to drop the package into their environment and just go.  It was important to me that the WFA package be a complete self-contained plug-in type of solution that required very little customization.

When you now (proudly 😀 ) review the solution, what do you like most about it?
Jeremy – Ok, I might be bragging a little here but honestly, I am proud of how simple it is to use.  A NetApp Storage Architect can now create fully intelligent and structured WFA workflows while enforcing NetApp and the customer’s best practices.  The architect can have the workflow build entire tenancies or application stacks and then share the workflow with the VMware team.  Within minutes, the VMware team can literally pull the workflow into vCO and be off the ground.  It really is that simple.

So, watch the videos, download the package, and enjoy the power of automation!