vCloud Director plug-in feedback

[cdecanini_]

Hi,

VMware is looking for feedback to improve the vCloud Director plug-in. While I have some ideas I thought it would be a good thing to ask here.

Please list actions, building block workflows that would help you if they were part of the library to build your own workflows:

For example If I look at the library elements I have created a lot of these could be used by other people in their own workflows and should be part of the plug-in library so other people do not have to create these on their own or download it from communities.

Please list any other possible improvement, ideas on what would help you to deliver workflows in a more efficient way.

I will award points to exhaustive answers.

Christophe.

[qc4vmware]

I think you may have answered your own question possibly.  A lot of the samples you all have posted would be nice to have as part of the default libraries. Maybe a half dozen queries using the query service for example or interacting with the meta data tagging.  The vCAT examples are awesome as well and I think they should be included.

I would also like to see some of the actions updated with additional parameters.  For example I have been forced to create my own actions and workflows around deploying templates so that different nic types can be supported.  The workflows default to creating PCNET32 nic's with no option to specify anything else.  I feel like I sometimes run into scriptable objects that only "mostly" map to the api.  I see this in both the vCD and vSphere plugins.  That can be fairly frustrating.

We also really need to get this product working correctly with Single Sign On.  I know this is not specifically vCD related but we are leveraging vCO most heavily along side our vCD deployment and have been struggling with the authentication.  vCO does not like our directory structure.  SSO seems to account for it as we can add each domain but then we hit bugs in vCO when we set that as the authentication source.  I have not has a chance to check the current vCO beta that is part of the vCD beta but I am hopeful this is no longer an issue.

Lastly this is a core vCO item but again is causing me quite a bit of frustration.  We need to get the workflow scheduler working.  Hopefully this is also fixed in the current beta but it has been impossible to schedule daily jobs without leaving a user logged into an interactive session.  If that session gets killed you have to remove and reschedule the jobs.  Not good.

[cdecanini_]

Thanks Paul, this is a very valuable feedback.

While the subject is not vCO itself I will point the vCO PM / engineering team to this thread.

Having out of the box content for the metadata, queries is something I had in mind since I have contributed in this area.

The NIC issue is something definitly worth looking at. If you have other examples like this or can point to threads for this one or similar please answer here.

As for the vCAT examples, these are more solution implementations than building block workflows we usually find in the workflow libraries. As one of the main contributors of the vCAT example my experience is that it is difficult to make these implementation generic enough so they can work in all cases and being supportable by engineering. We will discuss these more complex workflows anyways.

Keep the good stuff coming :smileygrin:

-edit- I have just seen you attached a package for the NIC issue.

Christophe.