Last week I attended VMworld Europe in Barcelona. I had a great time, eating tapas, drinking Rioja and learning something new in between. I already wrote about elasticity achieved using project fargo and docker on my company blog. Since this blog is more automation focussed I wanted to highlight some automation news. OR actually it is more about the future of Orchestrator.

The first thing that stood out to me was the lack of vCenter Orchestrator uuhh vRealize Orchestrator break-out sessions. I think there were two or three session explicitly about Orchestrator. A couple others went a little bit into orchestrator but were focused on vRealize Automation (vCAC). Last year there were quite a couple of sessions about Orchestrator. Telling us it was the best kept secret or the best VMware product never released and we should really go and use this awesome tool. And of course they were right to say so. And seeing where VMware is going with Orchestrator I was really surprised they didn’t give it more attention during Vmworld.

Which brings me to my second point. It is clear by now that Orchestrator will be used as the back-end for vRealize Automation. We can already see this in the current versions: The integration with NSX is completely implemented using Orchestrator. vCAC ugh… vRA has no interaction with NSX whatsoever, everything is handled via Orchestrator.

The same goes for what VMware calls Anything as a Service. Which is delivered using the Advanced Services Designer. Yeah that’s a lot of buzzwords in one sentence. In reality it is just a forms designer which you can use to design user front-ends for Orchestrator workflows. The objects created by the workflow can then be managed by vRealize Automation.

I already see that the adoption of Orchestrator is mainly driven by the use of vCAC. But there is more to come. VMware told in one of the Orchestrator sessions that Orchestrator will be used as a DEM replacement for vRealize Automation (but any information given in such presentation may change at any time). For who isn’t familiar with vCAC/vRA; The DEM is the Distributed Execution Manager. It is basically the component which does the actual work in a vCAC deployment. Currently it is 100% .net code and runs MS .NET workflow foundation workflows. So it makes total sense to replace that workflow engine with VMwares own workflow engine. The result will be that some day we can get rid of the windows components in vCAC and end up with just a virtual appliance which is easy to deploy and configure. That day will be a good day.

To be able to use orchestrator on the scale that vRA requires there will be some changes to the product in the future. For example, better permission management, multi geographical deployment models, integration with DevOps solutions and a lot more.

So although Orchestrator didn’t get a lot of attention during VMworld it seems it is going to play a crucial role in VMware’s automation strategy. Nice 🙂