Sam McGeown

When you are using a VMware orchestration platform with an official VMware plugin to manage a VMware product, you don’t really expect to have to fix the out-of-the-box workflows. However, during some testing of some workflows with a client the other day we ran into a couple of issues with the vCloud Director plugin workflows.

Software versions used

• vCloud Director 5.5.1 (appliance for development) and 5.5.2 (production deployment)
• vRealize Orchestrator Appliance 5.5.2.1
• vCloud Director plugin 5.5.1.2

CPU allocations are incorrect for both “Add a VDC”

When you provide the CPU allocation model properties for the Allocation Pool model the first problem is decrypting the naming - it doesn’t match the names in the vCloud Director interface!

[Update Dec 2016: An updated article for vRO 7.x is available here ]

I’m developing some very large, very complicated workflows for vRealize Orchestrator (vRO/vCO), and as it’s a Java based application it will probably come as no surprise to many that the performance of the client drops off sharply as the client’s RAM usage creeps up.

When working on some of the larger workflows, or after long sessions and heavy clipboard use, the client would become (even more) sluggish and in some cases would freeze entirely. This is particularly annoying because the vRO client has a habit of forcing itself on top of other applications - for instance Task Manager.

A requirement that often arises in large, complex orchestration projects is the need to encrypt and decrypt information. One such requirement recently specified triple DES password based encryption as the standard, which led me through a lot of Google searches to CryptoJS .

CryptoJS is a growing collection of standard and secure cryptographic algorithms implemented in JavaScript using best practices and patterns. They are fast, and they have a consistent and simple interface.

It’s a fairly common requirement when creating a new user to assign a randomly generated password, so during a recent engagement I wrote a little password generator to do that. I wanted to be able to chose whether special characters were used, and the length of the password - typically if the password doesn’t used special characters I would increase the length significantly!

Characters should be randomly picked from:

• a-z
• A-Z
• 0-9
• (optional) ASCII special characters

Inputs

• passwordLength - the length of the password to be generated (number)
• excludePunctuation - exclude the use of special characters if TRUE (boolean)

One of the use cases I’ve been working on with a customer is based on the vRO/vCO multi-node plug-in and involves the master vRO/vCO node calling proxy workflows based on a parameter - in this case the target site. As you can see from this very simple diagram, a Cloud Management System (CMS) calls a workflow on the Master node, which then executes a proxy workflow on the correct site. The trick is getting the Master Orchestrator node to pick the right proxy workflow.

To quote the release notes for the latest version of vCO/vRO Multi-node Plugin:

The VMware vCenter Orchestrator Multi-Node Plug-In allows organizations to manage environments with multiple vCenter Orchestrator server instances.

As organizations increase their level of automation, they often find the need to deploy multiple Orchestrator instances. With the VMware vCenter Orchestrator Multi-Node Plug-In, administrators have a more efficient way to manage multiple Orchestrator instances from a central point. The plug-in allows administrators to log in to a master Orchestrator server to view the inventories and workflows of remote Orchestrator servers, and to trigger workflows remotely.

To add a Windows Server 2012 R2 PowerShell host using Basic Authentication only, follow these steps.

Ensure that the Windows Firewall service is running (it doesn’t matter if the firewall is enabled or disabled, it should always be running! That’s a general rule, not just for this).

On the PowerShell host open a command prompt (*NOT* PowerShell console) as administrator and run the quickconfig command - you can re-run it if it’s already been run - but make sure it has.

Yesterday (in case you missed it) was the fourth annual UK national VMUG at the National Motorcycle Museum in Birmingham. It was my second year attending and I continue to be blown away with the quality and value available at this event.

There’s a huge amount of content packed into this one-day event, so I’ll try and summarise my day…

vCurry and vQuiz

The vCurry event was hosted on Monday night and is a great way to chill out after a long drive up to the midlands. It’s always well attended and there are always familiar faces from the London VMUG there. Also there is the now legendary vQuiz, hosted by Stuart Thompson (@virtual_stu) which is great for a laugh or two and makes a good ice breaker if you’re there on your own. Oh, and free curry and a free beer or two…what’s not to like?

Having finally got some SSDs to be able to use my PernixPro/PernixPrime NFR license, I thought it was about time to get PernixData’s FVP 2.0 running in my lab again. I haven’t used FVP in my lab since it was running in beta, so I was keen to see the awesome new features in action. It really is an easy install process and took me less than an hour to get my cluster up and running with VMs I/O being accelerated.

I am aware that that’s not a catchy blog post title. In fact, it doesn’t even really describe the problem or solution very well - for that I need to go into a little bit more depth!

Suppose I have configured a Reservation with two Networks ticked (“192.168.1.0-VLAN1” and “192.168.10.0-VLAN10”). As you can see in the screenshot below, each of the networks has a Network Profile created and assigned with a network pool to provide IP addressing for the VMs.