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Congratulations to Chris Greer for Winning Automating vSphere with vCenter Orchestrator

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A week ago, I ran a simple contest to give a way a free copy of  Automating vSphere with vCenter Orchestrator Book. To enter the contest, you just had leave a comment with 5 things you wish or hope to automate using vCenter Orchestrator. I am happy to announce the winner of Cody Bunch's new book is Chris Greer! Congratulations Chris!

Chris's comment was the following:

1). I would like to put a web ui in front of the request process for a vm.
2). I want to call out to other services like request tracker via their rest interface
3). I want to automate vcloud director with automated task like license tracking
4). I want to automate network appliances like load balancers and firewalls when deploying specific templates (like web servers)
5). I want to be able to kick off vco workflows via a soap/rest call to extend current scripts
Bonus: I'd love to configure SRM but I don't think it's integrated yet.

Chris, hopefully the new Automating vSphere with vCenter Orchestrator book will help you accomplish these tasks!

Thank you to those who enter and if you did not win, you should still go and grab a copy of Cody's book (available in Kindle and paper back format) and learn how easy it is to leverage vCO in your vSphere environment.

Win a Free Automating vSphere with vCenter Orchestrator Book

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Our good friend Cody Bunch has just recently released a new book called Automating vSphere with vCenter Orchestrator (available in Kindle and paper back format) that provides administrators with a complete walk through of installing, configuring and automating your vSphere infrastructure using vCenter Orchestrator. This is a must have book for all vSphere administrators looking to further automate and orchestrate your virtual infrastructure!

I still consider myself a beginner in vCO, but I have found that it has been very easy to create some really cool workflows such as this, this and this and you do not even need to be a developer to start using vCO! I am looking forward to reading Cody's new book.

Both Pearson and Cody Bunch was kind enough to provide me with an additional paper back copy of Automating vSphere with vCenter Orchestrator. Since sharing is caring, I will be giving away this copy to one lucky reader of virtuallyGhetto!

How do you win?

Just leave a comment below with the top 5 things you would like/hope to automate using vCO in your vSphere infrastructure. I will randomly select a winner a week from today. Even if you do not win, you should definitely still grab a copy of Cody's book and learn how easy it is to leverage vCO in your vSphere environment.

Performing A Storage vMotion in vCloud Director Using vCO

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I wrote an article yesterday called Performing A Storage vMotion in vCloud Director Using vCloud REST API and at the beginning I mentioned a few alternative solution to using the vCloud REST API such as the vCloud SDKs: Java, .NET, PHP or the new vCloud Director cmdlets. Afterwards, I realized I left out one very important solution, which is using vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) with the vCloud Director plugin.

I was able to quickly put together a vCO workflow using the Query Service in the vCD plugin and with the help of this VMTN thread from Christophe Decanni. I have exported my workflow so you can easily import it into your vCO Server without any hassle.

Disclaimer: Please thoroughly test this in a non-critical environment before using it on production systems.

Download: StoragevMotionForvCloud.workflow

To start using the workflow, you will need to ensure you have the vCloud Director 1.5 vCO plugin installed and import the workflow after you have downloaded it to your local system:

Here is a quick view of what the Storage vMotion for vCloud Director workflow looks like:

Here is an example execution of the workflow where we will Storage vMotion (using vCloud "relocate" API operation) to move "vESXi-01" VM from "iSCSI-3" to "iSCSI-4" datastore.

Step 1 - Select vCloud vDC and vCloud VM that you wish to performed the Storage vMotion. As part of the initial query, user will be provided with the current datastore the vCloud VM is residing on:

Step 2 - Once the query has completed to identify the current datastore the vCloud VM is residing on, a user interaction request will be needed to select the destination datastore to perform the migration to. You will notice the workflow icon will change to a yellow color and requiring an "answer" from the user. Right click on the workflow and click on "Answer" to continue the workflow:

Step 3 - You will see a "result" field which is the query of the vCloud VM that was selected and the datastore it's currently residing on. You will now have the option to select the vCloud datastore you wish to Storage vMotion the vCloud VM to:

Step 4 - Now you are ready to kick off the Storage vMotion operation. This may take sometime to finish depending on the size of the VM and the speed of your underlying storage. You should see a message under "Log" specifying the operation has been started. If everything is successful, you should see the vCloud VM now running on the new datastore.

Now you can enjoy performing Storage vMotions in vCoud Director with just a click of a button with the help of vCenter Orchestrator! Happy workflowing 🙂