Did you know that through the use of VMware Orchestrator within vSphere 4 you can automate the process of..

• Converting disks to thin provisioned disks across your entire environment
• Remove old snapshots, remove excess snapshots, remove snapshots of a given size
• Discover and remove unused orphaned VMDKs
• Upgrade virtual hardware
• Turn on time synchronization
• Provision and de-provision VM’s, based on load, based on temporary project demand, etc.
• Disconnect all detachable devices, and on and on..

Then why no love, I ask? Is it for lack of awareness, lack of field engineer creativity or is the product truly ahead of its time? I can tell you its not due to setup complexities, which as a whole will run you about one twenty-fourth of your day. And that is a combination of first-time reading and doing…

As a by-product of the Dunes Acquisition back in 2007, it did however trip out of the starting gate as it was only offered as an add-on with Lifecycle Manager (which in my eyes got no traction). Fast forward 3 years, its free (great reposition) and rides a top the most successful and only true Cloud-OS out, vSphere 4. This drag and drop workflow componentry, can ease the burden of day to day mundane tasks for any pocket administrator. Manual tasks may be your thing, but it ain’t Orchestrator’s thing..

So my question is how big a role does/will Orchestrator play in private to public cloud federations? Is Orchestrator the true “sleeper cell” within VMware’s portfolio, positioned as free in one regard but really underpinning all of its future (and present?) automation products? To me the true value in Orchestrator has not been realized or even touted as much as it should, it certainly has not lived up to its potential. Can we as a partner and VMware as a vendor do more to educate customers on the true benefit of such automation? If we manage to pull this off maybe cloud federation wont be so “pie on the sky” at least from our customers perspective..

Please comment, I am curious of your thoughts!

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