Announcing the availability of the VMware and IBM Netcool IPs for Orchestrator!

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Today we are very excited to announce the availability of 2 new Integration Packs (IPs) for System Center Orchestrator.

We have published the new IPs for IBM Netcool and VMware vSphere which are available for immediate download by clicking the links.

Further details about the two IPs are below:

System Center Orchestrator 2012 Integration Pack for VMware vSphere

This version of the integration pack for VMware for vSphere contains new activities, new features, and enhancements. You can read the release notes here.

New Activities

Activity

Description

Maintenance Mode

Provides functionality to both enter and exit maintenance mode for an ESX host. Entering maintenance mode prevents VMs powering up or failing over to the host if it is taking part in a high availability cluster. Maintenance mode is normally enabled prior to powering off the host for hardware maintenance.

Get Host Properties

Retrieves a list of properties for a specified host in the VMware vSphere cluster. Examples of these properties would be Connection Status (Powered on, disconnected, etc) and Maintenance Mode state.

Get Host Datastores

Retrieve a list of datastores available for a specified host managed by the VMware vSphere server. This can be used to check capacity of the system when automatically adding a new VM to the managed host

New Features

This integration pack includes the following new features:

  • The Get Hosts activity now returns, in the published data, the state of the Host in the cluster, such as running or maintenance mode.
  • The Clone VM activity now does not show the datastore or hosts in object's subscription list which aren’t available. Previously all datastores / hosts were returned, now only the available ones are returned.
  • New timeout field added to the options menu for all VMware vSphere activities. If no value is given, this will default to 100 seconds.
  • Support added for ESX 4.1 and as a result adding support for Windows 7 Guest Operating Systems as well as other operating systems, as below:
  • The 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows 7
  • The 64-bit edition of Windows Server 2008 R2
  • The 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows Vista

Issues Fixed

The following issues have been fixed in this integration pack:

  • DNS Settings now configured on Clone VM activity correctly as supplied. This is a comma-separated list of DNS servers.
  • You can use a custom port to connect to Virtual Center. The port value is blank by default, with blank value representing to use the default port.

System Center Orchestrator 2012 Integration Pack for IBM Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus

This version of the integration pack for IBM Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus contains new features and enhancements.  You can read the release notes here.

New Features

This integration pack supports the following new features:

  • Activities support connection to IBM Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus v7.3
  • All activities can connect to the Netcool Object Server using an SSL Connection.
  • All features now use the same logging framework. There is no longer a requirement for Java specific logging information.
  • All activities now publish UTC fields in two formats; the original long timestamp (1269986359), and the OIS standard format (M/d/yyyy h:m:s tt).

Issues Fixed

The following issues are fixed in this integration pack:

  • Previously, activities would fail if a string contained a combination of a single quote and a question mark.
  • The Monitor Alert activity no longer allows published data in Monitor Alert fields. Monitor Alert fields accept only variables.

We will have further announcements to make about new IPs over the coming weeks!

Adam

Adam Adam Hall Senior Technical Product Manager Orchestrator white blog

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