5.5

Table Of Contents

Managing Workflows 2

A workflow is a series of actions and decisions that you run sequentially. Orchestrator provides a library of

workflows that perform common management tasks according to best practices. Orchestrator also provides

libraries of the individual actions that the workflows perform.

Workflows combine actions, decisions, and results that, when performed in a particular order, complete a

specific task or a specific process in a virtual environment. Workflows perform tasks such as provisioning

virtual machines, backing up, performing regular maintenance, sending emails, performing SSH operations,

managing the physical infrastructure, and other general utility operations. Workflows accept inputs

according to their function. You can create workflows that run according to defined schedules, or that run if

certain anticipated events occur. Information can be provided by you, by other users, by another workflow

or action, or by an external process such as a Web service call from an application. Workflows perform some

validation and filtering of information before they run.

Workflows can call upon other workflows. For example, you can reuse in several different workflows a

workflow that starts a virtual machine.

You create workflows by using the Orchestrator client interface’s integrated development environment

(IDE), that provides access to the workflow library and the ability to run workflows on the workflow engine.

The workflow engine can also take objects from external libraries that you plug in to Orchestrator. This

ability allows you to customize processes or implement functions that third-party applications provide.

This chapter includes the following topics:

“Key Concepts of Workflows,” on page 14

“Standard Workflows in the Workflow Library,” on page 16

“Set User Permissions on a Workflow,” on page 16

“Run a Workflow,” on page 17

“Respond to a Request for a User Interaction,” on page 18

“Scheduling Workflows,” on page 19

“Use Workflow Version History,” on page 20

“Restore Deleted Workflows,” on page 21

“Export a Workflow,” on page 21

“Import a Workflow,” on page 21

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