This book covers a lot of ground and discusses the interactions with a lot of other infrastructure services such as AD, e-mail, the vSphere infrastructure, and vRealize Automation.

You can use this book with Orchestrator versions 5.0, 5.1, and 5.5 as well as with the renamed version, vRealize Orchestrator (5.5.2.x, 6.0, and newer).

The requirements differ from chapter to chapter. For Chapter 1, Installing and Configuring Orchestrator, and Chapter 2, Optimizing Orchestrator Configuration, you just require some space on your virtual infrastructure to deploy Orchestrator and maybe a working vCenter. Everything in Chapter 3, Visual Programming, can be accomplished with only the Orchestrator appliance; however, it's more fun with a vCenter around. Chapter 4, Working with Plugins, will require some more infrastructure such as e-mail, AD, REST, SOAP, SNMP, and AMQP. Chapter 5, Basic Orchestrator Operations, and Chapter 6, Advanced Operations, require mostly only Orchestrator and a working vCenter structure. For Chapter 7, Working with VMware Infrastructure, you will require a fully operational vCenter. A vRealize Automation installation is only needed if you are planning to use this product.

Some readers might not have all the resources or infrastructure to rebuild or play with some of the recipes; however, I'm sometimes in the same boat. As a consultant, I travel a lot, so while writing this book, I used this little mini lab. It isn't fast or fancy but it does the trick.

My mini lab consists of a laptop with Windows 7 Pro and VMware Workstation 10 on an Intel i7 quad core (3.4 GHz) with 8 GB RAM. My base VMs look like this: