vCenter Orchestrator – Active Directory Like A Boss

This week has me finishing up Chapter 10 or so of the upcoming vCO Book (Amazon pre-order link here). Chapter 10 is the “How to cleanse a VM with fire” or so, and one of the varied bits of clean-up you have to do after deleting a VM is to pop that sucker out of your AD. Afterall, you don’t want to have stale machine accounts sitting around do you? That’s almost as bad as the stale pizza left on your table… no good.

Getting the vCO AD Plug-in

Point your favorite browser here, and select “plug-ins”:

Installing the vCO AD Plug-in

After you’ve logged in and pulled the 11MB worth of plugin down, you’ll want to log into your vCO Configuration interface and go to the plug-in’s area to upload it:

Those with a keen eye will notice I’ve already got it installed. You’ll need to restart the vCO server service to complete the installation.

Configuring vCO AD Plugin

Thankfully the homelab is small enough that the “Copy from LDAP” bits works pretty well. Your mileage will vary:

Workflows in the AD Plugin

Now, take a gander at some of the new things exposed in your vCO client:

There are a few more than that also.