VMware vRealize Orchestrator Essentials

Get hands-on experience with vRealize Orchestrator and automate your VMware environment

About This Book

• Gain an in-depth understanding of vRO in the VMware infrastructure
• Create your own advanced vRO scripts using JavaScript
• A step-by-step tutorial to manage and create workflows with vRO

Who This Book Is For

This book is for VMware vSphere administrators who have minimal experience with automation tools and want to learn how to effectively automate their environment with VMware vRealize Orchestrator. A basic understanding of the VMware vSphere terms and concepts would be helpful.

What You Will Learn

• Familiarize yourself with the Orchestrator architecture and Explore how plugins can expand Orchestrator’s capabilitiesExplore how plug-ins can expand Orchestrator’s capabilities
• Deploy and configure the vRealize Orchestrator appliance
• Schedule and run workflows using the vSphere Web Client
• Create your own workflows with minimal work
• Use workflow presentations to improve your automation projects
• Integrate JavaScript to enhance your workflows
• Debug your workflows for errors and fix them
• Learn how to create, import, and export packages, to enable easy exchange solutions with others

In Detail

The automation of virtual environments has become the focus of many endeavors. VMware vRealize Orchestrator is a tool that enables you to automate not only your VMware environments, but also the surrounding hardware and software infrastructure. Orchestrator is also a central tool in the VMware cloud initiative and is extensively used by products such as vRealize Automation.

In this book, you will learn how Orchestrator is able to help you automate your complete VMware infrastructure as well as its surrounding hardware and software. After deploying and configuring the vRealize Orchestrator appliance, you will learn how to run the existing workflows that are a part of the Orchestrator library. You will also see how the vSphere Web Client integration of Orchestrator reduces the time you spend on your daily admin tasks.

The main aspect here is to learn how to create new workflows from existing ones. You will also look at how you can create completely new workflows. This includes learning about JavaScript and using presentation features to improve the layout and user friendliness of your workflows. Toward the end, you will learn to check for errors in your workflows and debug them. By the time you’re done with the book, you’ll be proficient in managing your workflows.

Style and approach

This book follows a sequential approach with ample screenshots in the examples that convey a deeper understanding of all Orchestrator-related tasks.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Architectural Overview
Chapter 2. Deploying and Configuring the Orchestrator Appliance
Chapter 3. Integrating Orchestrator with vSphere
Chapter 4. Working with Workflows
Chapter 5. Combining and Modifying Workflows
Chapter 6. Advanced vRO Scripting with JavaScript
Chapter 7. Improving Workflows with Presentation
Chapter 8. Errors, Logs, and Debug Mode
Chapter 9. Packing It All Up