Connecting vRealize Orchestrator 7.6 to vCenter

Do note, this is not a "best practice" guide, more a documentation on how I did configuration in my home lab

Most likely the first thing that you want to do with your Orchestrator, is to add your vCenter instance to your Orchestrator, so you can run workflows against it.

To do that, let's log in to your Orchestrator HTML5 Client.

Go to workflows. We need to search the right workflow for us. Use two keywords, "add" and "vcenter", and we should be able to find a correct workflow

Click "RUN" on "Add a vCenter Server instance" workflow to start it.

Give your vCenter IP or FQDN to form. You might also want to check "Do you want to ignore certificate warnings? If you select Yes, the vCenter Server instance certificate is accepted silently and the certificate is added to the trusted store", at least if you are using self-signed certificates.

Go to "Set the connection properties" tab, and give username and password that are used to connect to vCenter. 

Click "Run", and wait for workflow to run.

If everything goes as expected, you should see that status is "completed".

You can now go to Administration -> Inventory, and you should be able to see your vCenter inventory from here:

We have now succesfully added our vCenter instance to Orchestrator!

Installing vRealize Orchestrator 7.6

VMware vRealize Orchestrator has changed quite a lot, and it now has a brand new HTML5 client, which is the default one. You can still use legacy client, but there can be some compatibility issues between workflows done with new vs. legacy client.

Do note, this is not a "best practice" guide, more a documentation on how I did installation in my home lab

Orchestrator comes as an ova file, so deploying it is quite straight forward, and I'm not going to through that process.

But, after you have done the initial deployment, this is what I did.

I first logged in to https://<appliance ip>:5480, to check if there are any updates available. Well, there was none at that time.

Next I went to Control Center. You can find it by going to front page of your appliance, https://<appliance ip>:8281/vco/ (or by going to http://<appliance ip>, which will redirect you there) and selecting "Start the Control Center"

It will ask you for you root / pass, that you provided during deployment of .ova

First we configure a host name:

Then authentication. Since I do not have vRealize Automation, I did choose vSphere as authentication mode, and gave it my vCenter address:

You need to click "accept certificate" first.

Give account that you use to connect to vCenter:

 After that, you need to select Admin group that has access to vRO, and you are done.

Now you should see vRO Control Center

If you want, you can test that authentication works, by going "Configure Authentication Provider -> Test Login"

Now you should be able to login to your Orchestrator Client, go to front page of your appliance, and select "Start the orchestrator client"

For the first time, it gave me this:

But after logging out of my vCenter, I was able to log in succesfully. It should give you your vCenter login page:

And after giving credentials,we are logged in to our brand new HTML5 based orchestrator client!