vCAC & vCO a marriage made in the clouds – Part 1

In case you weren’t aware, with the introduction of vCAC 6.0 we have officially brought together the two major automation offerings in our portfolio, vCO and vCAC automation. There has always been the ability to call vCO from DynamicOps and VCAC but with this release the two are finally officially married and the possibilities are endless.

You may be asking why is this so important?

• vCO is now included with the vCAC virtual appliance
• Is the entire basis for automating the XaaS (anything as a service)
• It enables the customization of workflows without additional licensing or consulting
• Leverages existing vCO experience with IT admins
• Can take advantage of already created vCO workflows from an external vCO instance

I’m going to break these steps down into parts for easier consumption.
Part 1: vCAC and vCO – Configuration
Part 2: vCO -> Powershell, vCenter, and AD
Part 3: Automating a state change
Part 4: Automating a menu action

Let’s dive right in! Welcome to Part 1

First we will begin with the vCAC configuration, starting at the initial orchestration endpoint. I use the embedded throughout but if you have an external vCO you can take advantage of that as well.

• Log into vCAC web interface https://vcac-virtual-appliance.fqdn/shell-ui-app/org/tenant as a infrastructure administrator
• Navigate to the Infrastructure tab -> Endpoints -> Endpoints
• Add a new Endpoint
• Orchestration -> vCenter Orchestrator

Next we’ll walk through the setup of the endpoint

• Name your endpoint (I use embedded vCO)
• Address should be in the https://vcac-virtual-appliance.fqdn:8281/vco format
  
• Credentials will be administrator@vsphere.local 
  
• Custom Properties must have VMware.VCenterOrchestrator.Priority with a value of 1 *warning this is case sensitive!

Now for the rest of the configuration we will make the customizations via the vCO workflows.

Launch the vCO client

Login in when prompted with administrator@vsphere.local account. You will then be greeted with the vCO home page. Make sure to select Designer in the drop down and expand the tree until you get to “Add a vCAC host” -> Right click and Run or click the green run arrow.

You will now be prompted with a workflow to configure the connectivity to the vCAC IaaS server. This workflow will prompt you for the following details

• Step 1:
• Name – this is simply what you want to call the vCAC host
• Hostname – https://%hostname.FQDN%
• Accept Cert – YES
• Time outs – leave defaults

• Step 2:
• Shared Session
• User name (*NOTE THIS IS ONLY THE USERID)
• Password

• Step 3:
• NTLM – Leave blank
• Domain – Appended to userid during authentication (*NOTE THIS SHOULD BE THE NETBIOS NAME NOT THE FQDN)

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3

You will now see the connectivity to vCAC being created. Once complete you can verify with the green check mark next to the workflow.

Next we will install the vCO customization. This will give you the power to assign workflow actions to vm or blueprint as well as creating unique menu items to offer additional actions that can enable things like cloning from the self service portal.

Navigate the tree menu to your “Install vCO customization”. Right click and run, or click the green arrow to execute.

You will now be prompted with a workflow to configure the connectivity to the vCAC IaaS server. This workflow will walk you through selecting the vCAC server you just setup

First hit the “Not Set”

It will provide you with the vCAC tree, select your vCAC host

Choose which lifecycle workflows you would like vCO to be associated with (ALL)

Define the number of additional menu items you would like. This gives you additional actions that can be entitled to users. Think of these as action items you could create for things like cloning, etc…

This process will take some time, after several minutes you will see the green check mark next to the workflow.

You have now got vCAC and vCO completely connected and configured. We now can start to focus on Part 2 of this series getting the same type of connectivity to external providers (AD and Powershell)