On my last post I received some good feedback. Thanks everyone! I wanted to take a minute and go over a real world example of why I think we should all be making a big deal of this “integration” thing, specifically on the application benefits side of the world. While it’s easy to sit back and think “yeah yeah, integration – I get it” I don’t think any of us really do – yet.
In this simple example the diagram shows how anyone can begin developing deep integration into their application deployment process using vCenter and vCO, saving significant time and moving closer to the push button infrastructure everyone strives for.
Providing an input file that contains the critical data such as server names, tcServer configuration, F5 load balancer virtual IP and policy information and running this through vCO to deploy within your private cloud you can enable the push button build and configure capability you are looking for. This holds true for any application really. Let’s face it – Lab Manager and Redwood combined can’t do this since their extensibility is somewhat limited. The key here is vCO. It’s ability to integrate with almost anything and extensible management framework is what brings the power to this equation.
You may be asking – “it can’t be that easy?” Well – you are somewhat right. You do need someone who knows the SDK inside and out and a little JavaScript to write custom logic like I outlined. There are however many out of the box plugins available for vCO.
What is confusing to me is why more ecosystem partners, and companies for that matter, are not writing plugins for vCO. I don’t know if this is VMware’s fault for not engaging with more partners on vCO or the partners don’t see the value. It could also be that everyone is counting on vCenter integration providing the integration but let’s face it, customization specifications haven’t changed much since they were introduced.
Whatever the case may be it is time for this to change! It’s time for vCO to find it’s place it the world!
