You have a complex workflow or one that has saved you a lot of time?
The two workflows that I have created and that I am happiest with are my VNic upgrade and my Hardware Version upgrade workflows.
The first one I published as a document here. It is pretty short and sweet and it has saved our server operations team a lot of time by them not having to change the mac when we upgrade the nics to vmxnet3.
The second one is more involved and actually includes the vnic workflow as a part of it.
I wrote this one when we were faced with upgrading the virtual hardware to version 7 across 100s of virtual machines. Due to the way our company is set up my group does not have access to the guest operating system, just the vmware layer so that limits what I can do.
The workflow starts with one of the vmware admins selecting a virtual machine and entering in the email address of the owner of the server.
The workflow sends email messages throughout the workflow, instructing the server owner of what their next step is.
For example, when it is waiting for the VM to be powered off it sends an email to the owner telling them to shut down the VM whenever it is convenient for them.
Basic steps:
Now it is your turn. Got any cool workflows you want to show off?
Hm, cool workflows?
many many many many many
One example:
A workflow used to run in background for demonstration on an event, which creates a basic infrastructure, clones some VMs, and destroys everything again. ...to be used as scheduled Task (the next version will schedule itself "phoenix from the ashes"-style, like Andreas' example in http://communities.vmware.com/thread/318791 )
Other interesting stuff:
Workflows that manage Exchange Permissions (as part of a webviews-based service-portal for HR), nothing VMware specific in here...
Integration tests: Call Yahoo Finance Webservice to check for some stock quotes, and deploy additional VMs on a treshold (just for fun :smileycool:).
And with the new Plugins for SOAP and REST also Twitter-Integration is possible (e.g. react to a twitter post)
Everything is possible. vCO.
:smileylaugh::smileylaugh::smileylaugh:
Regards,
Joerg
Nice.
That's the kind of stuff I was looking for, things that will give me ideas as to what I can do here at work.
I think that sharing what we have done will be a good thing, seeing what other people have done helps kick-start my creativity
My "holy grail" has been a VM disk alignment workflow that is currently going through it's 2nd (or 3rd) rewrite... We've used the current version to align about 1500 vms, but it definitely isn't for the faint of heart. ; )
Deric
Deric wrote:
My "holy grail" has been a VM disk alignment workflow that is currently going through it's 2nd (or 3rd) rewrite... We've used the current version to align about 1500 vms, but it definitely isn't for the faint of heart. ; )
Deric
Sounds cool, any chance you'd be willing to share some high-level details?
What are you using to do the actual alignment? mbralign?
Thanks,
Magnus
Sure. So at a really high level, we take input for source vms, alignment datastore, destination datastore. We test the source vms (using mbrscan) to see if alignment is necessary. If necessary, we svmotion them to the alignment target, which in our case is a specific NFS datastore. We align the vms (using mbralign), if linux, we fix grub. We move the vms to the ("aligned") destination datastore.
Let me know if you have any other questions. I'd consider sharing it if others were interested, although it'd need a bit of polishing up first.
Deric
Hello Deric,
A few years have passed since your VMWORLD 2011 presentation, but I'm having a need for the inspect and fix approach for legacy VMs with misaligned partitions. I cannot find your presentation. Are you able to share now? Any improvements? Here's where I've heard the rumor of your presentation "2049 How OCLC Used vCenter Orchestrator to Automate the Disk Alignment of 1500+ Virtual Machines":