With the release of vSphere 4.1, VMware also updated a number of related products. One of them is vCenter Orchestrator (vCO).
vCO (formerly VS-O) comes from the acquisition of Dunes Technology in September 2007. VMware decided to include it for free in the vSphere 4.0 Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions.
The new release (build 581) introduces a few but important features:
- Native 64bit architecture for both client and server tiers
- Optional stand-alone 32bit client
- Engine upgrade to Java 1.6
- Support for vSphere 4.1
- Data migration tool for vCO 4.0 customers
- Extended configuration limits:
Interestingly, the vCO development team published on its unofficial blog a list of deprecated features that won’t appear in the next version of the product:
- Authorizations: These are rarely used. Authorizations enable or disable managed vCenter Orchestrator objects in Web views. vCO developers prefer to manage these objects programmatically (if you look at LCM internals, you can see how it is done).
- OGNL expressions in workflow presentations: These were used by advanced developers. The workaround is to use Javascript based actions, which simplifies development and maintenance anyway.
- Policies: Often, policies were used to schedule workflows. Since vCO has a workflow scheduler it is easy not to use policies. Another use of policies is to trigger a workflow if a defined event occurs. vCO 4.0 introduced a new workflow element that waits on such events. A possible workaround to replace policies is to implement a “wait for event” loop that starts parallel workflows.
- Web views: Web views depend on older versions of the Dojo toolkit (used in the Web front end) and on the Tapestry framework (used in the Web back end). Since there is no replacement for Web views just yet (other than the SOAP Web service, that does not include a presentation layer), you can still use Web views vCO in 4.1.