vRealize Orchestrator 8.1 (and others) announced!

I’m late to the party as usual but simply needed to write up a little quick post on this.

VMware announced a whole slew of new releases yesterday with the primary focus being on vSphere 7 and the new Kubernetes integrations that brings. I hope to get time to look more into Kubernetes on vSphere once that becomes available as this is an area I have much interest in learning more about.

But the biggest thing for me as of right now is the announcements for vRealize Orchestrator 8.1!

I have really wanted to like the new HTML 5 interface that came in 7.6 but it had issues! No lie there. And as I have not had the time to test it in 8.0 yet I hope that 8.1 will bring back some of the glory to vRO!

Among the features I will look forward to the most is the return of the “Tree-View” to show a hierarchical sorting and bundling of related workflows. The tag based approach used in 7.6 and 8.0 don’t really appeal to me. I like to be able to tag workflows but not being able to sort and organize them in any other way is not optimal.

But that said. The absolute biggest wish on my wishlist for vRO has come true! To quote the announcement:

Multiple Scripting Languages: PowerShell, Node.js,Python. Support for multiple scripting languages have been added: PowerShell, Node.js, and Python. This makes vRealize Orchestrator more accessible and easier to use for non-JavaScript users. “

Finally Powershell will be directly available in vRO not requiring a complicated setup using a Windows host and all of the double hop authentication issues that arise from this. And to get Python as well! It’s almost Christmas!

I can’t and won’t go over all the announcements yesterday – other bloggers out there are already doing this and I’d like to give some credit to those working hard on this. For that reason I will point you all to Eric Siebert’s list of links to articles and annoucements regarding vSphere 7 and related releases.

Take look at the list here: http://vsphere-land.com/news/vsphere-7-0-link-o-rama.html

vRealize Orchestrator VC plugin version

I keep forgetting this to be a problem so might as well write it down for myself and anyone else stumbling upon this.

When using vRO, in my case 7.5 or 7.6, you might get a problem where you are unable to add a vCenter instance of a vCenter version 6.7. The error is not very informative:

It doesn’t really scream out what the error is. But as I had seen the error before I had a hunch when my colleague was configuring vRO in our vRealize Automation platform.

On the vRO VMTN forum there is a post that contains the latest release of the vRO VC plugin – https://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-32872

Simply download the zip attached. Unpack the vmoapp file. Login to the vRO control-center on https://<FQDNorIP>:8283/vco-controlcenter/ and select “Manage Plug-ins”. Here under “Install plug-in” click browse and select the vmoapp file and upload. Accept EULA and install. After about 2 minutes the vRO will have restarted and the plugin updated.

vCenter instances can now be added 🙂

vRealize Orchestrator 6.0.2.1 -> 7.0

Oh such end of the year content!

I set about updating our vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) appliance from 6.0.2.1 to 7.0 today to solve the recently released security issues (VMware Security Advisory ID: VMSA-2015-0008.1).

Easy update with the VAMI available but I quickly ran into this issue:

FailedUpgradeNot very informative – so looked at the updatecli.log file in the given location and it only told me that the pre and post installs had failed. Again not very informative. I looking into the vami.log file and saw that it had downloaded all the files and had made a file to mark a reboot required. So I thought – better try and reboot before starting the install again. This looked at first to work! But alas, the update just later threw this error:

FailedUpgrade2Will update post when I find solution!