Appendix A: Custom Workflow Development Guidelines : Orchestration Content Lifecycle
   
Orchestration Content Lifecycle
The orchestration content lifecycle is the process of staging the elements of the solution from development to test, test to pre-production, and pre-production to production.
Figure 26. Orchestration Content Lifecycle
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Packages are used for exporting content from one Orchestrator server to another. Packages can contain workflows, policies, actions, web views, configurations, and resources. Packages or their individual elements or both, can also be synchronized directly from one server to another one as long as the servers are interconnected.
At creation time, packages manage dependencies between package elements by adding missing elements automatically. During a package import, the server analyzes and displays differences and lets the administrator choose which elements to import. Packages use X509 certificates to monitor which users export and redistribute elements.
After a package meets the required quality criteria for a release, export and store it, either on a backed-up file system or on a repository vCenter Orchestrator server, that is, a server used specifically for storing packages. At export time to the file system, there are options to do the following:
*Encrypt the package.
*Set Digital Rights management to prevent the customer who imports the package from seeing the JavaScript code or modifying or repackaging elements.
*Not export the element’s version history.
Use vCenter Orchestrator configuration elements for all the attributes that have dependencies on the environment to allow orchestration content to be moved from one Orchestrator server to another without requiring the workflows to be edited or the attribute values to be modified. It is recommended that you provide configuration workflows with the solution, set the configuration, and update the configuration attribute values if needed.