Accepted Solutions
Hi!
I recommend you to watch the videos on http://www.vmwarelearning.com/orchestrator to see an introduction in vCO.
vCO provides a technical workflow engine, to run automation tasks in a reliable "enterprise ready" way:
- Checkpointing allows workflows to continue to run even after a server crash
- Included scheduler to run workflow at a given date/time, hourly, daily, ...
- Audit trail: Who exectued what workflow when and with what outcome?
- Integration: vCO Plugins allow the workflows to integrate every external system that can be automated (via an existing special plugin for that product/system, the generic plugins for REST,SOAP,SMTP,SNMP,AMQP,SSH,SQL, ... and you even can develop your own plugin!)
- integrated version control of the workflows: You can see who changed the workflow how and when (you can even jump back to older versions if someone screwed it 
)
- integrated in vSphere Web Client: You can run and monitor workflows directly from the web client
- workflows can be interactive (e.g. for aprovals)
Common use cases are:
- vCenter automation (obviously.. you can do the same as you can do in PowerCLI)
- Integrating vCloud Director to the rest of the world
- Automate your IT processes that include other systems as well (CMDB, Ticket system, Monitoring ,...
- support the vSphere admins (want to have an automatic snapshot reminder workflow? 5 minutes to create... )
- reporting workflow
- orchestrating upgrades and migrations (there is a Plugin for VMware Update Manager, Auto-deploy ...)
- If you want, you can even build your own custom self-service portal based on vCO workflows, vCO provides a powerful REST API itself. (However, VMware of course offers some out-of-the-box products for this, too 
)
- Disaster recovery workflows (again, there are out-of-the-box products available, too)
- lab management workflows
- ...
- ...
- ...
Cheers,
Joerg
Hi!
I recommend you to watch the videos on http://www.vmwarelearning.com/orchestrator to see an introduction in vCO.
vCO provides a technical workflow engine, to run automation tasks in a reliable "enterprise ready" way:
- Checkpointing allows workflows to continue to run even after a server crash
- Included scheduler to run workflow at a given date/time, hourly, daily, ...
- Audit trail: Who exectued what workflow when and with what outcome?
- Integration: vCO Plugins allow the workflows to integrate every external system that can be automated (via an existing special plugin for that product/system, the generic plugins for REST,SOAP,SMTP,SNMP,AMQP,SSH,SQL, ... and you even can develop your own plugin!)
- integrated version control of the workflows: You can see who changed the workflow how and when (you can even jump back to older versions if someone screwed it )
- integrated in vSphere Web Client: You can run and monitor workflows directly from the web client
- workflows can be interactive (e.g. for aprovals)
Common use cases are:
- vCenter automation (obviously.. you can do the same as you can do in PowerCLI)
- Integrating vCloud Director to the rest of the world
- Automate your IT processes that include other systems as well (CMDB, Ticket system, Monitoring ,...
- support the vSphere admins (want to have an automatic snapshot reminder workflow? 5 minutes to create... )
- reporting workflow
- orchestrating upgrades and migrations (there is a Plugin for VMware Update Manager, Auto-deploy ...)
- If you want, you can even build your own custom self-service portal based on vCO workflows, vCO provides a powerful REST API itself. (However, VMware of course offers some out-of-the-box products for this, too )
- Disaster recovery workflows (again, there are out-of-the-box products available, too)
- lab management workflows
- ...
- ...
- ...
Cheers,
Joerg
