Orchestrator is licensed with vCenter. You need at least a vSphere Standard licensing to use Orchestrator. Although Orchestrator is not available with the Essentials and Essentials Plus licensing, it can be operated in Player mode only. This limits your usage to executing existing workflows and prevents you from editing or creating them. All other licensing models allow you to use Orchestrator with all its features.

As already stated, Orchestrator was available as a Windows install in versions 4.x and 5.x. With the introduction of Version 6.x, the Windows installable has been retired. In Version 5.x, a Linux-based appliance was introduced, and it is now the only available version of Orchestrator.

If you are using vSphere 4.x and 5.x and you have installed vCenter, you will already have had Orchestrator installed as well. To enable it, you just need to start the required service in Windows. Due to the retirement of the Windows install, this book will not cover this method; however, it is described in the VMware vRealize Orchestrator Cookbook.

The Orchestrator appliance can be downloaded from the VMware website. You will find it in the vSphere downloads.

The VMware compatibility matrix shows that vRealize Orchestrator 6.0.2 is compatible with vCenter Server 5.1, 5.5, and 6. That said, you need to be a bit more careful; SSO has been changed quite a lot between vSphere 5.1, 5.5, and 6, so there still are some problems. Best practice dictates that you should stay with the same versions. You can use vRO 6 with vCenter 5.5 or 5.1, but you should replace the vCenter plug-in and that's not that easy.

For a beginner, I would suggest you stick to any of the following combinations of vSphere, vCenter, and Orchestrator:

In this book, we focus on vSphere 6 with Orchestrator 6.

Another part of the architectural view is how Orchestrator authenticates users.

Authentication is the topic that describes how Orchestrator knows that a certain user can access it and what he is allowed to do. Since VMware introduced SSO (Single Sign on) in vSphere 5.1, it should be considered the preferred method for Orchestrator authentication. However, Orchestrator is also able to use AD and LDAP for authentication. We will configure Orchestrator with SSO in the next chapter.

After we have talked about authentication, we should also talk about a dedicated service account. What this means is that when Orchestrator itself needs to communicate with another service, for example the vCenter server, it should use a user account only used by Orchestrator. This is a pretty common practice in Enterprise systems and allows for easier reading of log files if there is a problem.

You can use one dedicated user for all services, as shown in the figure earlier, where the same technical user svc_vRO is used for vCenter, database, and e-mail. Alternatively, you can have one user for each service, a different user for e-mail, and one for the database connection.

Orchestrator needs a database. The Appliance comes with an internal database (PostgreSQL); however, for production use, you should consider using a dedicated MS SQL, PostgreSQL, or Oracle database. If you are using Orchestrator in a production environment, you want to make sure that the database is backed up the same way your other important systems such as vCenter are.

In theory, you can use Orchestrator without any VMware infrastructure around it; however, that's not fun. You should have at least a complete VMware vSphere environment consisting of a vCenter server and ESXi hosts. Orchestrator itself is a core component for VMware vRealize Automation (formally known as vCenter Automation Center, vCAC).

Other services that help make Orchestrator more productive are E-mail (SMTP system) or SNMP. This allows you to send e-mails from Orchestrator to users, notifying them about workflow executions and errors.

You can also access a POP or IMAP account via Orchestrator using the mail plug-in. This allows you to send e-mails to the Orchestrator server in order to execute workflows.

Orchestrator is not almighty; there are still some limitations you should know about. vRealize Orchestrator version 6.0.2 has the following limitations when left unconfigured:

Steps may be taken to increase these values, but this topic is beyond the scope of this book and is covered in the product documentation.

So what to do if you need more than this? Easy; use the multinode plug-in to use more than one Orchestrator instance at the same time.

If you are using Orchestrator as your main tool for production, you might want to consider clustering it. Clustering provides high availability (HA) and load balancing of the number of workflows but does not increase the maximum connected vCenters / ESXi hosts / VMs to each Orchestrator. Clustering is not part of this book; however, you can find it in the second chapter of VMware vRealize Orchestrator Cookbook.

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):