Using vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) to create reports

vCenter Orchestrator is the VMware tool to orchestrate our virtual infrastructure. But we can use it also to retrieve data of the current state of our platform.

Building reports with vCO

There are many cases in which we discovered that it is very useful to get data directly from vCenter Orchestrator to be stored in a CMDB or to see the current state of some components of our infrastructure.

To achieve this, we have created a small framework which includes a Web Service (custom for each implementation), a communication library to deal with vCO and an XML format for the workflows to return the data.

Workflows

The query workflows must be created to obtain the information we need and to return it in a specific XML format. You can add whatever data you need as long as you keep to the format.

Communication library

We have developed a library which understands the XML format and turns it into a generic object collection that we can use in our code. It also includes an abstraction to make to call the vCO API easier.

Web Service

We need to create a Web Service for every solution and its goal is to present simple methods to the user.
It has the ability to support GET, POST and SOAP calls and also to return JSON results if they’re needed.

Demo

In the following video you can see an HTML page showing Hosts, Datastores and Virtual Machines information directly from the vCenter Orchestrator.