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Tuesday, March 12, 2013

vCAC and vCO - a perfect match?!

Why is vCAC important to vCO you may ask... Because it´s the missing piece you need for intelligent rules, lifecycle management and role-based cloud usage!
Yes, you can build this with WaveMaker and any other Frontend, but you have to build the "business intelligence" and that´s what makes it really hard (trust me, I had several projects in the past).

So vCloud Automation Center allows you to provision VM´s and vApps in vSphere and vCloud environments based on roles and business groups. Sometimes this is enough. But, what if you want to integrate 3rd party systems, well know vCO workflows or partner applications based on vCO?

You can follow this excellent post, Tom O´Rourke and Joe Sarabia have written:

http://clearascloud.blogspot.de/2013/03/vmware-vco-workflows-integration-with.html

One thing that I missed to have a perfect match was the return value of the workflows. So I wanted to have the result displayed with the VM or in the self-service portal. So I checked for the options in the vCAC Designer and enhance the workflow with an additional option called "LogMachineEvent".















So I attached this WF element at the end and filled it with several parameters:














In my case the word "Ergebnis" (german for result) should be shown as info log message in the user´s selfservice portal. After uploading and xml/blueprint submission I was able to select the "Invoke vCO" option:

















and received the result in my "recent events" log:


















So just try it and it will become the perfect match :)