Preface

This is the second book that I have written on the subject of vRealize Orchestrator, the first being the vRealize Orchestrator Cookbook. The cookbook covers a lot of ground and is pretty full on. So we came to the conclusion to write a book that covers more of the essentials of Orchestrator and helps novices get an easy start.

This book focuses on the basic skills that you need to learn to use Orchestrator. When you've worked through it, you will know enough to create workflows and use them productively as well as share them with the rest of the community. In this book, I tried to keep the focus on the essential skills, and I will explain about backgrounds as much as possible. The book can be regarded as a training class where we build up our skills from one chapter to the next. We will develop a new workflow and then constantly improve it to understand and implement new topics.

Please note that VMware vRealize Orchestrator was renamed from vCenter Orchestrator in late 2014 and is not a new product. In this book, we will just use the name Orchestrator.

This book has been written with vRealize Orchestrator 6.02, but almost everything discussed in this book is applicable to the older versions as well. The following table gives you an overview of what won't work in which version: