Additional sources for Orchestrator
Working with Orchestrator became much simpler in the last year. As more and more people and companies adopt Orchestrator for their automation, many more publications and posts are created. The following listing is essentially a snapshot of the most used resources.
Documentation
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.
Books
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.
VMware community
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.
Websites
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:
http://www.vcoteam.info/: This is Christophe Decanini and Burke Azbill's website. It contains a lot of topics starting from very basics up to some specialized plug-in handling. If you like to learn new things this is where you will probably find it.
http://kaloferov.com/blog/: This blog contains extremely useful code examples especially for PowerShell.
http://www.vcoportal.de/: Joerg Lew has been working with Orchestrator since 2004 and has collected an amazing amount of useful tips.
Websites that help you learn JavaScript are plenty. I personally find http://www.w3schools.com/js/ a really useful page.
Google searches
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):
(vCO OR vRO OR Orchestrator) [problem]
: Due to the renaming of Orchestrator, a lot of posts and blogs still use the old naming—vCO (vCenter Orchestrator). Using Google and the uppercaseOR
, you can search for the old as well as the new name.site:communities.vmware.com [problem]
: Thesite:
tag will make sure that Google only looks inside the VMware communities.