We are now going to configure the vCO and Advanced Blueprinting service. This is really where we can extend the capabilities of vCAC to do almost anything. vCenter Orchestrator will be the main focus here.

At this point you should have finished the previous 6 steps:

Part 1: Deploy and Configure the Identity Appliance

Part 2: Deploy and Configure the vCloud Automation Center Appliance

Part 3: Installing IaaS Components

Part 4: Tenant Configuration

Part 5: Agent, Endpoint, and Group Configuration

Part 6: Create and Publish Blueprints

Before we start we need to login to the vCAC Appliance as root: ssh vcacappliance.mycompany.com -l root

Start the vCO Configurator by typing service vco-configurator start and you will see the following show on the screen.

Originally Posted at the VCE Vblog - The Choice Overload Problem

My wife recently signed our family up for Netflix, and ever since then I've been perusing the catalog late at night trying to find something interesting that isn't a pre-2000 era movie. There's a few different "Best of 'TED Talks'" so I decided to give it a whirl. The first one I watched was called "Life Hacks". I was immediately dialed in from the different ways people view everyday situations. Heck, one of my favorite ones was Terry Moore: How to tie your shoes and I realized I had been tying my shoes the wrong way my entire life. But there was another one that hit home for me.

Sheena Iyengar (@Sheena_Iyengar) is a Professor at the Columbia Business School, a graduate of Stanford University, and has an extensive list of published works and research studies. A few years ago, she gave a famous TED Talk called How to make choosing easier. It has received 1,000,000+ views on TED.com and YouTube. She discusses research findings from case studies done by choices that CEOs and individuals such as you and I make on a daily basis. As well as the choices that are made when we are given a set amount of options. I would encourage you to watch the entire 16min segment (atleast the first 7 minutes), but I'll summarize in the next paragraph.

In the realm of virtualization, the majority of us have been implementing VMware. VMware has consumed around 90% of my attention over the past few years. This is why we are intrigued to read Duncan and Frank's books on in-depth HA and DRS technical algorithms. In 2013, a lot of attention has shifted away from a primary VMware focus and more Hyper-V and KVM discussions are happening. Hyper-V for cost reductions and feature parity, but KVM for native OpenStack integration. OpenStack has garnered much attention in 2012 & 2013 and will most certainly evolve more in 2014. The one thing we can see here is that the hypervisor market isn't big. At this point, we have a choice of 3 (i know there are more) "production-ready" hypervisors and we must choose how to manage them. Choosing a strategy is a very big decision for many. Have you considered how your hypervisor strategy will take part in your networking strategy over the next few years? As you can guess, the days of caring about in-depth HA & DRS inner-workings, vSphere architecture diagrams, and more has fallen to about <30% of my attention span.

The days of the command-line IOS junkie are doomed, but the world of software-defined networking is in infancy. Many of the people I follow on twitter have a narrowed view of this landscape. Particularly, VMware's acquisition of Nicera (NSX) is what made everyone start caring about SDN in the first place. Not going to lie, I was a green-horn myself and still am. I don't want to be the bearer of bad news, but NSX isn't the only player in this game. In fact, there are lots! We primarily hear about the big ones coming from the tech giants such as Cisco, HP, and Juniper, but it's also worth noting that there are plenty of others out there with competing (and sometimes even better) technology. SDN is the new wild west frontier and only a few will come out victorious with a large grasp on the landscape.

Over the past 2 weeks I've been working on implementing a new feature that was requested by Christian Mohn (@h0bbel) on the the vSoup Podcast. This new feature will hopefully allow you to create more JumpSquares faster.

Version 1.2 (1.9.14)

• Added Nmap Scan XML functions. Upload Nmap XML file to create JumpSquares quickly.
• Changed a bunch of deprecated Rails 3 warnings to be Rails 4 compliant.
• Uploaded new wiki appliance with all new functionality and Debian Wheezy patches
• Fixed bootstrap modal appearing on right side of screen

Ed Czerwin (@eczerwin), Chris Dearden(@chrisdearden), and Christian Mohn (@h0bbel) have an addicting podcast called vSoup. vSoup focuses on day to day IT operations and virtualization from the trenches. Each of the guys are respected bloggers and faces in the community.

This past week during their 40th episode, they talked a bit about my latest project JumpSquares. Christian gives a good overview and talks about how he uses the appliance based model in his environment because it doesn't have direct internet access. Remember, there is also the SaaS based version at JumpSquares.net that I encourage you to use.

The guys talked about using a tool such as nmap to go out and fetch machines on the network to quickly populate your JumpSquares. It's a great idea and I'll try to begin working on that in the next few weeks after I take another CCNP exam so my CCNA doesn't expire. If you have any more suggestions or feature requests, I'm always open to hearing about them.

vSoup Episode #40 - General Purple is better than Agent Purple Any Day [ 52:17 ] Hide Player | Play in Popup | Download (161)

Here are the show notes:

We are almost done with the initial setup to get to a point where we can start provisioning. In this scenario we are going to use a normal clone functionality that is a similar process across vSphere, Hyper-V (SCVMM), and KVM (RHEV). If you want to know about all the provisioning scenarios such as Linked Clones read Choosing a Provisioning Scenario.

At this point you should have finished the previous 5 steps:

Part 1: Deploy and Configure the Identity Appliance

Part 2: Deploy and Configure the vCloud Automation Center Appliance

Part 3: Installing IaaS Components

Part 4: Tenant Configuration

Part 5: Agent, Endpoint, and Group Configuration

after this step

Part 7 - Setup vCO, Endpoints, and Advanced Services

Create Clone Blueprint Information

Welcome to Part 5: Agent, Endpoint, and Group Configuration

You should have completed Part 1-4:

Part 1: Deploy and Configure the Identity Appliance

Part 2: Deploy and Configure the vCloud Automation Center Appliance

Part 3: Installing IaaS Components

Part 4: Tenant Configuration

Part 5: Agent, Endpoint, and Group Configuration

Part 6: Create and Publish Blueprints

Part 7 - Setup vCO, Endpoints, and Advanced Services

During the vCAC Complete Install process, we already installed a vSphere agent. We need to create "Agents" or workers that know how to talk to specific endpoints.  There are a few different types of agents and each one has similar installation procedures. The links below will take you to official VMware documentation. We are going to go over the Proxy Agent Configuration for vSphere for configuring the IaaS components.

• Proxy Agent for vSphere
• Proxy Agent for Hyper-V
• Proxy Agent for XenServer
• VDI Agent for XenDesktop
• EPI Agent for Citrix
• EPI Agent for Visual Basic Scripting
• WMI Agent for Remote WMI Tasks for Windows Machines

The vSphere agent/endpoint here is a "vCenter" instance. If you have more than 1 vCenter, then you need to install an additional vSphere Agent on the IaaS Components VM. There is a 1:1 mapping. To install an additional vSphere Agent, scroll to the bottom of this blog post. During the deployment in Step 3 we either kept the name "vCenter" or changed it to the actual name of vCenter during this screen. This name will be used again here.

At this point you should have finished the three prior steps:

Part 1: Deploy and Configure the Identity Appliance

Part 2: Deploy and Configure the vCloud Automation Center Appliance

Part 3: Installing IaaS Components

Part 4: Tenant Configuration

Part 5: Agent, Endpoint, and Group Configuration

Part 6: Create and Publish Blueprints

Part 7 - Setup vCO, Endpoints, and Advanced Services

The next step involves setting the user accounts and tenants. By default, we have already created the default tenant at https://vcac-appliance-hostname.domain.name/shell-ui-app (in my case https://vcac-identity.kendrickcoleman.c0m/shell-ui-app) that can be accessed with the This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. SSO account.

vCAC has the ability to be a Single Tenant or Multi-Tenant application. A tenant is an organizational unit within a vCloud Automation Center deployment. A tenant can represent a business unit within an enterprise or a company that subscribes to cloud services from a service provider. Each tenant has a unique URL to the vCloud Automation Center console where the default has been specified above, while mutli-tenant resources will be given a URL such as https://vcac-appliance-hostname.domain.name/shell-ui-app/org/mycompany. The default tenant is the only tenant that supports native Active Directory authentication; all other tenants must use Active Directory over LDAP or OpenLDAP.

In a single tenant configuration, everything is handled at the default instance. This includes system wide configurations. Tenant administrators can manage users and groups, configure tenant-specific branding, notifications, business policies, and catalog offerings. The system administrator account is always This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., while the tenant administrator must be a user in one of the tenant identity stores, such as username@mycompany.com.

In a multi-tenant environment, the system administrator creates new tenants for each organization that uses the same vCloud Automation Center instance. Tenant users log in to the vCloud Automation Center console at a URL specific to their tenant. Since we are only going to be exploring a Single Tenant configuration, please read more about multi-tenancy at Comparison of Single-Tenant and Multi-Tenant Deployments in the official VMware documentation.