7.5.4 Using Orchestrator as a vCloud Director Extension
vCenter Orchestrator fully supports consuming blocked tasks and notifications messages, callbacks, and calls to external systems by way of vCloud Director, AMQP, and other specific product plug-ins.
Figure 43. vCenter Orchestrator as a vCloud Director Extension
The AMQP plug-in comes with workflows, and requires a onetime setup. Provide values for the following:
Add a broker – Add an AMQP broker by providing hostname and credentials.Declare an exchange – Declare an exchange for the configured broker. Declare a queue – Declare a queue. Bind – Bind a queue to an exchange by providing a routing key. Subscribe to queues – Allow vCenter Orchestrator to receive message updates on new messages.
Restarting the vCenter Orchestrator server automatically saves and reloads the configuration.
The plug-in supports adding a policy element of type subscription having an onMessage trigger event. A policy can be setup to start a workflow processing new messages.
Workflows are provided to triage and process the message to output vCloud Director objects. These can provide all of the information necessary for audit purposes and for designing custom logic before calling external systems. There are two ways to call external systems:
S
pecific vCenter Orchestrator plug-ins adapters such as vCloud Director, vCenter, Update Manager, and Active Directory.
G
eneric plug-ins adapters such as REST, SOAP, XML, SSH, and JDBC.
vCloud Director Workflows can abort, resume, or fail blocked task objects. See Operating a VMware vCloud for example workflows using vCloud messages.
