vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) 5.5 - Part 1 Deploying the Virtual Appliance

vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) is a product which allows you to create tasks and automated workflows which and be run directly within vSphere Web Client or the vCenter Orchestrator Client.

There are a number of pre-made workflows to get your started, and the number of tasks you can perform is quite amazing. Any task that can be performed in vCenter can be automated through vCO, and thats just the start. Add some Active Directory integration, API's and other 3rd party plugin's makes this a pretty neat toolkit.

Workflows can be anything from simple workflows that contain a single task to say create a virtual machine, to complicated workflows containing many tasks that might build an entire solution and integrate with 3rd party plugins.

One of the best things about vCO is it's included with vCenter Server and it's free!

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How to Reset the Password for admin@System-Domain vCenter SSO 5.1 (Single Sign On)

If you are in the unfortunate position in which you or someone else has forgotten the vCenter SSO v5.1 admin@System-Domain password, then you may have a problem. Particularly if there are no other users delegated as SSO administrators.

However the aim of this blog post is to help you in resetting the admin@System-Domain password in SSO 5.1 only (it is much easier in 5.5)!.

First and foremost it's worth pointing out this is completed unsupported by VMware. VMware's advise and supported method is to reinstall SSO.

However you do have 2 other possible options I have presented below.

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Managing NMP - Changing the Default PSP for a SATP (Change from Fixed to Round Robin EqualLogic)

The default pathing policy for a LUN can be changed (for example from Fixed to Round Robin). This can be a LUN on an iSCSI or FC array (or FCoE for that matter).
When I refer to pathing policy I'm refering to what you may have seen if you've ever clicked manage path's on a VMFS datastore and see it set to Fixed, Round Robin (RR) or Most Recently Used (MRU).

In this example I will be changing the default pathing policy for an EqualLogic array from Fixed to Round Robin.

Before I get into how to change the multi-pathing policy, it's important to understand the below 3 plugins (NMP, SATP and PSP):

• NMP (Native Multipathing Plugin) is an extensible multipathing module within ESXi. "esxcli storage nmp" can be used to manage devices associated with NMP and to set path policies. SATPs and PSPs are plugins within the NMP plugin.
• SATP (Storage Array Type Plugin) determines how path failover is handled for a specific storage array.
• PSP (Path Selection Plugin) determines which physical path is used to issue an I/O request to a storage device.

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Configuring HTML Access (Blast) in VMware Horizon View 5.3

Since the release of VMware Horizon View 5.2 Feature Pack 1, it has been possible to access View virtual desktops simply via a HTML5 browser, without the need for the View Client.

Now in Horizon View 5.3 Feature Pack 1, this ability now has an improved feature set and really makes this a viable alternative in some cases to the full VMware View Client. It is particularly useful if you need to get access to a desktop quickly where the View client is not installed or cannot be installed, such as working remotely on a non company owned device.

Some of the improvements to functionality are:

• Copy and Paste bi-directional between virtual desktop and the client endpoint
• Audio playback support
• Performance improvements

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