I noticed a tweet recently by someone who was “surprised that vCenter Orchestrator has so few ways to trigger the starting of a workflow.” This came as a surprise, because there ARE many ways you can trigger our workflows. I’d like to take this opportunity to educate the community on just how many ways there really are…

vCenter Orchestrator provides the following base methods of triggering workflows:

• vCenter Orchestrator Client
  • Scheduler
  • Policies
• Web Interface
  • WebOperator Webview
  • Perspectives Plug-in
  • Custom Webview
  • Wavemaker
• vCenter Orchestrator API
  • vCenter Orchestrator SOAP Web Service
  • vCenter Orchestrator REST Web Service

vCenter Orchestrator Client

The vCenter Orchestrator Client allows administrators and permitted groups to launch workflows manually on a local or remote vCenter Orchestrator server. The functionality of running remote workflows is greatly enhanced when using the Multi-Node plug-in. Use of the vCenter Orchestrator Client is most common during the design, test, and troubleshooting of workflows. Additionally, the client offers the following methods of automated workflow triggering:

• Scheduler: provides the ability to schedule workflows to be running at user-defined intervals. Use-cases would include recurring maintenance tasks such as disconnecting media from all VMs prior to backup, deleting old snapshots, automatically creating snapshots, etc…
• Policies: Allows plug-ins such as the SNMP, AMQP, and vCenter to trigger workflows based on defined criteria. Use-cases would include remediating systems based on SNMP traps that exceed defined thresholds, responding to vCloud Director blocking tasks that have been posted to an AMQP bus, and starting a workflow based on state Change or thresholds of vCenter objects.

Web Interface

Lightweight administration may be performed using vCenter Orchestrator’s built-in webview functionality. The system uses Tapestry and Dojo technologies.

• Weboperator: The Weboperator that ships with the product gives administrators the ability to browse the entire workflow library, start and/or schedule workflows. It also allows them to:
  • Tasks: View, Suspend, Cancel, and Delete tasks (Scheduled workflows)
  • Workflows: Start/Schedule, view schema, variables, and events, respond to workflows waiting for input
  • Policies: Start/Stop/Reset and view defined Parameters
• Perspectives: The Perspectives fling allows an administrator to define a set of workflows to be accessible to an LDAP Group. For example, one could define 5 administrative/maintenance workflows to be visible to the Backup Admins group. Upon logging into the web interface, these Backup Admins would be able to start workflows, schedule them, view workflow execution events, schemas, etc…
• Custom webview: Custom webviews are created by developers to present specific workflows in custom layouts not afforded by the auto-generated layouts presented by the Weboperator and Perspectives. Service providers have used this method for public offerings, providing “Cloud” services years before “Cloud” was the big keyword.
• Wavemaker: There have been numerous blog posts on creating web interfaces for vCenter Orchestrator using this free product.

API

vCenter Orchestrator has always had a SOAP API available for interacting with it from remote systems. As of version 5.x, it also now has a more powerful REST API. The first visible use of the REST API is the vSphere Web Client. When properly configured, one can launch any number of workflows directly from the vSphere Web Client. Other VMware products that incorporate the ability to launch workflows include vSphere Service Manager and vCloud Automation Center. 3^rd parties have also built in support to their products so that vCenter Orchestrator workflows may be launched.

Using either of these APIs, any number of scripting and/or programming languages are capable of triggering vCenter Orchestrator workflows. Examples may be found on blogs as well as in the VMware Communities.   A quick search on google reveals examples of using PowerShell, PERL, Python, PHP, C#, JAVA, .NET, and Ruby to interact with a vCenter Orchestrator server.

As we can see above, there are many different methods of triggering vCenter Orchestrator workflows. Providing standard APIs around SOAP and REST greatly increases ones ability to incorporate vCenter Orchestrator into existing systems.

When building vCenter Orchestrator Workflows, chances are that you eventually have to integrate external systems with longer running (multiple minutes, hours, maybe even days) processes.

Examples for that are:

• Software Deployment processes
• Clone tasks
• When you have to rely on processes that only occur once a day (like an automatic discovery in a monitoring system)
• “semi-automatic” processes: The workflow creates a ticket, that is going to be processed manually, and continues with the automation after the ticket is closed.

 While it’s quite easy to initiate/trigger the external system to start that long running task, it is more challenging to programmatically figure out when the external task completed (and the continue with the workflow).
This article shows different strategies to wait for long running external tasks and their advantages and drawbacks.

“Synchronous” processing:

Here the workflow in vCenter Orchestrator triggers a long running process in an external system, and when this process finishes, the external system actively “tells” vCenter Orchestrator that it’s done.
This can be achieved through two (and a half) different ways:

1. The external system is integrated via a Plugin that provides Trigger elements or Events for vCenter Orchestrator Policies.
   If that is the case, you can use a “Waiting event” element in the workflow while waiting for the external task to complete.
   Example: The “Wait for Task” Workflow in the vCloud Director Plugin does exactly this. It is used by all the workflows of the vCloud Director Plugin that trigger long running tasks in vCloud Director.
   a “and a half”) If there is no special Plugin for the system you call out to, but this external system “speaks” AMQP or SNMP, you can use these plugins. The AMQP Plugin provides a Workflow “Wait for a message” for this for example.
2. Use a “User Interaction” element, that is answered by the external system via vCenter Orchestrator’s SOAP or REST API.

The workflow stops at the “User interaction” element, and waits for the answer.

Here the external system of course needs the ability to somehow call the vCenter Orchestrator API to answer the user interaction.

This way has a nice side effect: If something goes wrong in the external process, a human administrator can fix it and easily answer the element manually.

Having the external system actively call back to vCenter Orchestrator doesn’t waste any time when the external process is done. And it is not necessary for the workflow itself to examine that process (as it will be necessary with the next strategy).

“Asynchronous” polling:

If the external system which runs the long running process can not actively call back to vCenter Orchestrator, then there is only one other way to examine when it is finished: Polling.
To allow a polling in general, a workflow in vCenter Orchestrator must be able to figure out that the external process has finished. This sometimes can be done by checking the external system directly, e.g. because its API allows to monitor these processes, or you can check for a certain state of the external system.

In case it is not possible to check the external system directly if the process has finished (because it only provides a “fire-and-forget” sort of API for instance), then you might use some “helper”: Check if a certain file exists in a specified place, or if there is a certain entry in a database (remember the SQL Plugin for vCenter Orchestrator!), or even if there just is a new email in the mailbox vcoresponses@mycompany.com.

When you made sure how the workflow can figure out that the external process is completed, the next challenge is to organize to schedule the polling. Here again there are different strategies possible:

1. A loop in a JavaScript element that uses System.sleep()While this is a simple solution for short running processes, it is not recommended for to monitor longer running processes: System.sleep() keeps the workflow in a running state. So it keeps using system resources on the vCenter Orchestrator server.Example: The widely used “vim3waitTaskEnd”-Action in the vCenter Library that monitors the (usually short running) tasks in vCenter which have been triggered by vCenter Orchestrator.
   To save resources (and to not risk reaching the maximum number of concurrent running workflows, 300 in vCenter Orchestrator 5.1), it’s better to have the polling workflow in a not “running” state while waiting for the next poll. This can be achieved using following strategies:
2. Use a “Waiting Timer” element
   You first calculate the date & time when the workflow shall continue (with the next polling iteration), and then use a “Waiting timer” element. This will let the workflow get into a “waiting” state, so it’s state gets persisted in the vCenter Orchestrator database, and it does not use any runtime resources (“waiting” workflows also don’t count to the maximum number of running workflows!). When the calculated time is reached, vCenter Orchestrator will automatically “re-awake” the workflow again.
   
3. Use the Workflow scheduler
   vCenter Orchestrator allows to schedule workflows to run automatically at a given date/time, optionally with a recurrence, e.g. for every hour. Now you even can schedule workflows programmatically, using the “Schedule workflow” element in the schema. This can be used nicely for the polling workflows, it is even possible that the polling workflow schedules itself for the next run.Find an example how to do this (in a slightly other scenario, but you’ll can transfer it easily) in the communities: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/318791

However, all these strategies generate a linear growing: For every external process started one workflow waiting/monitoring/polling this process is generated. If you now have a lot of these, and/or very long running processes, then you might want to avoid this growing. Even that is possible with vCenter Orchestrator, by using Configuration Elements in a creative way. (In case you need a short “refresh” about Configuration Elements, read this article: http://blogs.vmware.com/orchestrator/2012/02/configuration-elements-revisited.html)

The idea is that a workflow starts a new external process, stores information about this process to a Configuration Element and then just finishes. Another SINGLE polling workflow then reads this Configuration Element, checks all external processes, and in case some of them finished it calls workflow that follows the external process.

So it does not matter if 5 or 500 external processes have to be monitored, there is always only one polling workflow active.

You can see, vCenter Orchestrator provides a lot of mechanisms you can use to build reliable workflow solutions even for difficult integration situations.

Article Author: Joerg Lew