If there is something I did right from the beginning of my IT career, it was automation and integration. Coming from a development background, it was natural for me to script or develop small tools to automate most of the manual tasks our team had to accomplish. This was in the mid 90s and required using a combination of scripting and programming languages, tools such as network boot and floppy disks, and performing low-level operations such as dumping PC BIOS to extract the information required by an installation process.

Since then, IT has evolved and now provides application programming interfaces to get information and perform remote operations. Simpler scripting languages were released to make these easily consumable, and virtualization provided the agility that was missing to automate a lot of data center operations.

Streamlining these operations as modular, reusable, highly available workflows is what VMware vRealize Orchestrator brought to the equation.

After being used prominently by service providers to build their public cloud offerings and the enterprises for their private cloud, Orchestrator is now fast becoming a core component of several VMware Software-defined Data Center capabilities such as self-service provisioning, custom service authoring, DevOps, and automatic remediation. The Orchestrator workflows powering these can be leveraged to design your own custom automation and integrations.

VMware vRealize Orchestrator Cookbook guides system engineers in understanding how to best design workflows to orchestrate data centers. It walks them through all the important Orchestrator features using real-world use cases presented as recipes, explaining how these work, and providing directions to aid further development.

My colleague Burke Azbill and I have been working with Orchestrator for the last 8 years, enabling our customers in their journey to the software-defined data center. We can definitely say that if we had had a copy of this book back then, it would have saved us hundreds of hours; even today, with all the experience we have, it is still a much-needed reference.

We have worked with Daniel Langenhan for the last 6 years, and we are delighted that he has managed to share so much of his knowledge and experience acquired by delivering Orchestration solutions to our customers; the result is that you can now unleash the power of Orchestrator.

We wish you the best in your workflow designs and deployments.

Christophe Decanini and Burke Azbill

Consulting Architects

VMware Global Center of Excellence

@vCOTeam / vCOTeam.info