Today’s training began with talking about bindings in vCO. This is an important part of making workflows as you can bind the element you are using to elements within vCenter. Then we went into a lab and used this knowledge to build our second workflow. Remember our first was Hello World.
This workflow was simple, create an inventory within vCenter. Have you ever wanted to be able to script out adding a new datacenter, cluster and hosts to that cluster. Well that is what we did with a workflow. First we walked through doing these steps manually. Then we worked on workflows to add each of these to vCenter. I really enjoyed this as I would start the workflow and enter in the details and then switch over to the vSphere client and watch the datacenter/cluster/hosts being added to it.
As the day progressed, we delved into more programming part of workflows to include looping and boxing. We discussed the foreach element and then used the knowledge in a couple of different labs in which we took and created vms and also moved vms from one network to another.
After these labs we discussed developer tools that can be used within vCO including the vCneter Plugin for vCO, vSphere API, PowerCLI, the VMware Managed Object Browser (MOB), and other SDKs for other programming languages such as Java, .NET, and Perl. Then we saw a demo of accessing the MOB and also took a look at how developers can use the web client and vSphere client to be able to build out workflows for vCO.
So far, I have enjoyed my time at class and especially enjoy the labs as I am one of those that likes to play with it with my hands. In fact, I messed up on one lab but was able to go back and figure out what I did. Two minutes later, another person in the class had the same issue and asked the instructor what to do.
I look forward to completing the class tomorrow and finishing the last 7 labs. We are halfway through the labs so I am guessing that tomorrow will be mostly labs. I can’t wait until we learn more. Feel free to comment with your own escapades into vCO workflows.
For a wrapup of day one go here.
For a summary go to here.
