Automating vSphere with VMware vCenter Orchestrator

By Cody Bunch
Published Mar 2, 2012 by VMware Press. Part of the VMware Press Technology series.

Copyright 2012
Dimensions: 7″ x 9-1/8″
Pages: 312
Edition: 1st

Book
ISBN-10: 0-321-79991-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-321-79991-3

Unleash the Power of vCenter Orchestrator to Automate Tasks and Improve Efficiency

Today, VMware administrators are responsible for far more infrastructure, servers, and services than ever before. To succeed, they must take full advantage of opportunities to automate and orchestrate their vSphere environments. In Automating vSphere with VMware vCenter Orchestrator, three-time vExpert Cody Bunch shows how to utilize VMware vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) 4.2 to achieve far higher levels of operational efficiency and effectiveness.

Bunch reveals what vCO can do, walks through each step of installation and configuration, explains how its “moving parts” work together, and thoroughly introduces both plug-ins and workflows. Building on this core knowledge, he presents several start-to-finish case studies showing how to use vCO to address real-world challenges ranging from provisioning to snapshots, cluster management to decommissioning.

Whatever your VMware virtualization environment, this book will help you do more with less, save time, eliminate errors, and improve both performance and reliability.

Coverage includes

• Understanding how vCO fits into your environment and identifying your best opportunities to use it
• Choosing the right installation scenario and efficiently managing the vCO installation process
• Configuring vCO: services, passwords, networking, LDAP, databases, SSL, licensing, plug-ins, backup, and more
• Interacting with vCO through actions, packages, plug-ins, web views, resources, and workflows
• Automating manual tasks with vCO’s extensive workflow library
• Creating sophisticated workflows with drag-and-drop components and JavaScript
• Using plug-ins to control infrastructure within and around your vSphere environment
• Bringing consistency to VM provisioning, overcoming “VM sprawl” and resource contention, and simplifying support
• Optimizing VM lifecycle management, all the way through decommissioning
• Automating all snapshot monitoring processes and components
• Exporting logs, finding/deleting orphaned files, and performing other day-to-day tasks
• Efficiently conducting mass VM migrations
• Quickly adding vCenter hosts and clusters, configuring shared storage, and adding hosts to new clusters
• Using vCO and third-party plug-ins to gain “private cloud” benefits and flexibility.

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