Additional sources for Orchestrator

The official documentation for Orchestrator can be found on the VMware website. Go to https://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/orchestrator_pubs.html.

Please note that you can select the version you want to have the documentation for. It's always a good idea to read the Release Notes to understand changes to the current version.

There are not that many books on Orchestrator. Actually, there are only three books that I know of, counting the one you are reading right now.

The first one that was widely recognized was Cody Bunch's book Automating vSphere with VMware vCenter Orchestrator published by VMware Press Technology. The book is based on version 4 of Orchestrator, but is still valid for most of its content. Cody has some really good explanations and examples; however, a lot of the topics discussed and what is captured in that book will look different or might not work in the way described in version 6.

The other book about Orchestrator is VMware vRealize Orchestrator Cookbook that I authored, and was published by Packt Publishing in February 2015. It covers a lot of ground and if you are a total beginner, it's better to start with the book you are currently reading. In that book, we talk a lot more about specific plug-ins and how to use them. It comes with more than 100 workflows that can be directly used. The book was based on version 5.5.x and 6 of vRealize Orchestrator.

There are many more books on JavaScript. Packt has published many JavaScript books. A book for beginners is Thinking in JavaScript, which also has the added bonus of being free. Another one is Learning JavaScript Data Structures and Algorithms.

In this book, we will introduce you to JavaScript in Chapter 6, Advanced vRO Scripting with JavaScript.

The VMware Orchestrator community is quite big and very active. You will find it under:

http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/vcenter/orchestrator

Here you can ask questions, find answers, and in general, obtain a lot of help. I recommend anyone looking for VMware related queries to start here.

There are quite a lot of websites and blogs that cover Orchestrator; we can't mention everyone, so here are the author's and tech reviewers' choices:

If you are looking for help on Orchestrator, one of the first things to do is search for the problem in Google. To help you find better results, you can use the following tricks (replace [problem] with what you are looking for):