Have you checked out the latest release of vCenter Orchestrator 5.1? If not, you should really consider taking a look as there are number of significant enhancements in this release. Deploying the vCO 5.1 virtual appliance is a quick and easy way of getting started and that is what I used to test drive the new vCO 5.1. One thing I noticed after deploying the appliance is that vCO now requires a few more steps for configuration and that means more clicking and longer wait before I can get started!

As you probably may have guessed, I had to look for a better way of setting up vCO so that I can get started faster! As far as I knew, there were no configuration utilities or APIs that I could leverage and all configuration changes had to be done through the vCO configuration web interface. After clicking around for a bit, I realized I could "ghetto" it by just sending in the raw HTTP requests the UI was performing. I ended up writing a very simple shell script and using Firebug, a very handy tool that I used from time to time to help me figure out what each request looked like.

Disclaimer: This is for educational purposes only, this is not officially supported by VMware. Please test this in a development environment before using it on actual systems.

You can download the script here called configureVCO51.sh

To use the script, you just need a machine with curl, you do not need to copy the script to your vCO server. You will need to edit the following variables in the script before executing:

VCO_IP_ADDRESS=172.30.0.203
VCO_DEFAULT_USERNAME=vmware
VCO_DEFAULT_PASSWORD=vmware
VCO_NEW_PASSWORD=vmware123
VCENTER_IP_ADDRESS=172.30.0.181
SSO_IP_ADDRESS=172.30.0.181
VCENTER_USERNAME=root
VCENTER_PASSWORD=vmware

The variables should be pretty self explanatory, you will need to provide the IP Address of your vCO Server and the default username/password for the vCO 5.1 appliance is vmware/vmware. You will need to specify the new password that you wish to set and then provide information about your vCenter Server as well as your vCenter SSO Server. In this example, I used the VCSA.

Note: The script currently assumes you will be using System-Domain\__Administrators__ as the admin group, if you decided to user another group, you will need to edit the confirmSSOServer section of the script. I also used the VCSA

Here is an example execution of the script:

The numbers on the left hand side of each task is the HTTP return code and as you can see, the script not only setups the vCO appliance but also enables the vCenter Server vCO plugin as well as adding in your vCenter Server 5.1 and then automatically restarting the vCO service for all changes to take effect. I timed my script versus a manual configuration (assuming you know exactly what to do), I was still able to get everything configured in less than 1.5minutes where as the manual clicking and waiting took almost 5minutes (remember, I knew exactly what to click on which means it could take even longer!).

At the end of the script, you should be presented with two URLs: one that takes you straight to the vCO configuration web interface in case you wanted to check or verify the settings and the other is the vSphere Web Client URL for your vCenter Server.

Here is a screenshot of the vCO configuration interface, we can see that everything is showing green for it's status:

Here is a screenshot of the vSphere Web Client and we can see that our vCO Server has been configured and is now accessible to us within vCenter Server.

This script can easily be modified to perform other operations within vCO (e.g. enabling other plugins/configurations), this was just a sample of what you could do. To add or modify other functionality, you just need to use Firebug and watch for the specific HTTP request that is made while you are manually performing the task in the vCO configuration interface. For more details on setting up the new vCO 5.1 appliance, I highly recommend you check out Christophe Decanni's vCenter Server & vCenter Orchestrator 5.1 integration tips doc.

Additional Resources: 

• Unattended Deployment of vCenter Orchestrator Virtual Appliance