This weeks vendorwag I’m chatting to Burke Azbill of the vCO (VMware vCenter Orchestrator) Team. In case you don’t know the vCO Team have launched a brand new blog – in effort to galvanize the VMware Community to use vCO, and in ease the way into using it.

Burke Azbill is an IT professional with 15 years of experience in tech-support, network administration, web development, programming, and automation. He holds certifications from Microsoft, Novell, Citrix, Linux Professional Institute, VMware, and ITIL foundations. He is the founder of www.vcoteam.info and a member of the Cloud Orchestration Services team in VMware’s PSO. As a member of the Dunes staff, he joined VMware as part of the Dunes acquisition at Vmworld 2007.

If you want to visit their site its here – It’s jam-packed with some great getting started videos!

If you want to follow the vCO Team on the little birdy  below!

I learned TWO really big thing about vCO whilst we did our vendorwag.

Firstly, I had always assumed that vCO was read-only to ALL customers, and you need a special license to make it customizable. I was SO wrong. I clearly needed my ears emptied of wax or my brain wasn’t engaged. It turns out in the lower SKU’s vCO is indeed a read-only environment, but for customers who are on the Std/Adv/Ent/Ent+ SKUs vCO is bundled with vCenter fully functional at no additional charge… DOH!

Secondly, did you know Onyx from VMware outputs JavaScript as well as PowerCLI code. In case you don’t know – Onyx is a free utility from VMware that acts like a “macro-recorder” intercepting your clicks through the vSphere client into raw PowerCLI code. Since 2.0 it also outputs in JavaScript as well – which means you need not learn JavaScript to necessarily get started with vCO. ACE!

This weeks vendorwag introduces a brand new format. Previous vendorwags have just been split-screen videos recorded via Skype of me interviewing the vendor. After giving this some thought it seems rather stupid to have a vendor present without them being able to show/explain/answer questions – with the product at hand. So as part of an experiment I’ve been seeing if I could get both the product and the two-heads in one video. It’s a bit crude at the moment to be honest, and will get more polished as time goes on… But this first one will give you an idea of the direction I hope to go in future.

As ever if you want the MP3 version of the chinwag it’s here – but to be honest it’s much easier to subscribe to the MP3 podcast via iTunes which means the podcast will be download when ever I do them. Alternatively, if you would prefer the videos on your iPAD/iPOD/iPhone – you subscribe to the video version of the Chinwags there (beware they are big!). If you don’t use iTunes, here’s the generic RSS Feed link

Anyway, because the resolution of the recording is too big to embedded into the webpage to stop you going squinty eyed – when you click the graphic below it should launch in separate window…The podcast version will rendered to fit the screen of your device (ipod/iphone/ipad). If you find the video too large to fit your screen you can download it here, and play it locally – that way your local player will render it relative to your screen…

This entry was posted on Friday, November 26th, 2010 at 4:18 pm and is filed under Chinwag, Vendorwag. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.