vCO - Automate vLM (VMware LabManager)

Today I wrote an article for the vCOteam blog: How to automate the VMware LabManager operations with the new SOAP plug-in!

http://www.vcoteam.info/learn-vco/how-to-automate-labmanager-with-vco.html

Please stay tuned, part two for vCD migration follows :)

vCO - who will live longer?

Today is the day for me: the most powerful plug-ins till dunes was aquired by VMware were released yesterday:

• the SOAP/REST plug-in
• the VUM plug-in

With these we are able to automate so much more of our own and 3rd party products. I think that nearly 80% of environments I have seen had applications with WSDL interfaces. Now we can implement them together with the cloud platform and automate daily jobs much better and faster.

Her you will find more information:

http://blogs.vmware.com/orchestrator/2011/06/vcenter-orchestrator-http-rest-and-soap-plug-ins-now-available.html

In the next days we will publish some "real world" examples :)

Have fun!

vCO - change the VM´s boot order

When automating the deployment of virtual machines there comes the time when you need to change the boot order of a virtual machine. 

First there is a bad news: the boot order is part of the virtual machine´s BIOS (.nvram) and there is no easy way to edit this file. The good news is: based on this community discussion and the powershell examples i start to test the VcOptionValue inside the vCO.

After a short period of build and test it works with this simple code:

The inputs are : vm (VC:VirtualMachine) = virtual machine and device(string) = cd, net or hd for the boot device. Please keep in mind that this forces the VM to use only this device.

With this code you are able to change or add other VcOptionValue´s also :)