Integrating with multiple versions

[SamWolf]

Hello,

I am currently working in an environment that has two clusters running and at version 5.1 of vCenter, vCO, and vCloud Director. My team has recently added a new cluster running 5.5 and this has throw quiet a wrench in my automation workflows. One of the major roadblocks I am facing is configuration of plugins between versions. Some examples of these errors are as follows.

In vCO 5.1 the vCenter plugin cannot pull any of the device inventories of the 5.5 vCenter, throwing the following error.

In vCO 5.5 when trying to connect my 5.1 vCloud director instances via the plugin I cannot connect due to the following

I have seen Burke's posts regarding a roll back of the plugin for the director specific error but I am worried that a roll back will break other features of 5.5

Has cross compatibility or even just backwards compatibility been addressed at all. Is it possible to use vCO with version discrepancies?

Thanks,

[iiliev]

Unfortunately, achieving such cross compatibility is very hard - if possible at all - technically. There are too many variables involved that should be taken into account and that could break the compatibility (client APIs, client libraries, authentication libraries, etc.). And most of them are not under the control of vCO team; we just consume what is currently available.

I see only 2 approaches that could possibly work:

  (1) The 2nd/3rd party product that we are wrapping in a vCO plug-in to expose a client library that hides all product version compatibility logic and exposes version-independent API. Most products are not there yet.

  (2) vCO to implement one plug-in for each product version and wrap them in some sort of plug-in 'facade' that will dispatch client API calls to the appropriate code version. This will, however, lead to exponential increase of plug-in's code/content complexity and will become a nightmare to support/maintain.

At the moment, I'm a bit pessimistic any of the above will happen soon.

[cdecanini_]

Downgrading the vCD plug-in is one of the few possible solution if it does not break on authentication.

You could test this on another stand alone vCO server and then use the multi-node plug-in to start all the workflows from one of the server. Make sure to read the requirements for the multi-node plug-in. I know in previous versions it required to have each node on the same version of vCO.

If you use SSO chances are that you will be in trouble since 5.1 and 5.5 use different SSO versions.