The VMware Technology Alliances Partner (TAP) Program provides many benefits to technology partners that enroll, including product licenses, marketing opportunities, training, roadmap reviews and VMware Ready certification for solutions that undergo the VMware Ready certification process. One valuable benefit to the TAP program is being able to post solutions to our marketplace, VMware Solutions Exchange (VSX).
Riverbed has been a longtime VMware partner that utilizes TAP and VSX to promote joint solutions and provide details describing how Riverbed products integrate with VMware. Currently, Riverbed has posted 8 different solutions to VSX and in December 2014 published a vCO Plug-in for workflow automation with vCenter and Riverbed’s SteelApp Traffic Manager.
The Riverbed SteelApp™ Traffic Manager inspects and processes application traffic, with full payload inspection and streaming. It applies a range of optimization techniques to ensure that incoming requests are presented in the most appropriate manner to the web and application servers. SteelApp also includes a web-based management administration interface for real-time analysis and historical context, while using SOAP APIs, RESTful API’s or SNMP for remote management and monitoring.
The VMware vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) plug-ins, now called vRealize Orchestrator Plug-in, uses common API’s to stretch workflows to 3rd party partners and automate those processes needed for the defined workflow. The 3rd party partners can create packaged workflows that automate specific features of the 3rd party, or enable a scripting capability so that the user can create custom workflows. You can see that the workflows, whether packaged or custom, are specific to those 3rd parties that create the vCO plug-in, providing a high degree of workflow integration.
It’s more clear to use an example, so let’s circle back to Riverbed’s recent solution development. The SteelApp plugin uses the SOAP API’s to make available the core load balancing functions of the Riverbed Traffic Manager to the vCenter environment in the form of workflows and actions. The plugin, in addition to automating the configuration aspects of load balancing, will enable the enforcement of standard processes around the configuration of the Traffic Manager and reduce configuration errors and service failures. Specifically, Riverbed created 22 unique workflows that are focused on inventory management or CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations. For instance, through the vCO Management UI, you can add a new SteelHead Traffic Manager (STM) to inventory, you can add an STM node to a defined Pool of resources, again through the vCO UI, and finally, you can delete an STM node from inventory as desired.
You can find more detail at the Riverbed VSX vCO Plug-in landing page or go directly to the deployment guide.
Please note the product name change during fall 2014:
* vCenter Orchestrator is now called vRealize Orchestrator
* The vCenter Orchestrator Plug-in is now called the vRealize Orchestrator Plug-in
