One of the cool functions of Orchestrator that helps a lot of admins is the possibility to schedule workflows for a later run. Just imagine the following scenario. You need to power off a VM at midnight for a scheduled outage time and then make sure that it's up again by 8:00 a.m. You can remotely log in if you have the possibility, or you have to stay in the office until then. Using Orchestrator, you can simply schedule these jobs. After you learn to build your own workflows, you can not only do simple jobs of running a library workflow, but also combining them. We will delve into this in the next chapter.

You can schedule workflows using the Orchestrator client or the vSphere Web Client. We will show how to do it both ways. I will use the rename VM workflow to showcase this as it has a low impact on the vSphere environment. The main difference between the Orchestrator Client and the vSphere Web Client is that by using the Orchestrator Client, you have more granularity in the selection of reoccurrences.

The Orchestrator Client

Scheduling a workflow by using the Orchestrator Client works in the following way:

1. Open the Orchestrator client and go to the workflow library.
2. Right-click on the workflow in Library | vCenter | Virtual Machine management | Basic | Rename virtual machine and select Schedule workflow. The Schedule workflow as option works exactly like the Schedule workflow with the added benefit that you can change the credentials of the executing user.
   
3. In the input window, select a Task name; the default is the name of the workflow. Sometimes, it's a good idea to make it a bit more descriptive.
4. Select a start date and time for the workflow to execute.
5. If the Orchestrator server was not available when the workflow should have been started, would you like to start it as soon as it is available?
6. Select the reoccurrence of the workflow execution. You can choose from No Reoccurrence to Monthly. Please note the Add entry link where you can select multiple occurrences in the same interval.
7. You can select an end date, which is when the last reoccurrence should take place. If you don't set it (leave it at Not set), the task will be executed indefinitely.
   
8. After you click on Next, you can continue with the input window for the workflow parameters.

The workflow is now scheduled, and you can look at it by clicking on the Scheduler icon that is displayed in the Run module.

In the scheduler, you can suspend, resume, edit and cancel/delete the task. Editing allows you to edit the reoccurrences, but not the workflow parameters. To change the parameters, you need to cancel the workflow scheduling and schedule it anew.

The vSphere Web Client

We will now schedule a workflow using the vSphere Web Client:

1. Open the vSphere Web Client and log in as a user who is a member of the Orchestrator administration group.
2. Click on the Orchestrator icon.
3. Navigate to Inventory Trees | Workflows. The Orchestrator workflow library will be shown.
4. Right-click on the workflow Library | vCenter | Virtual machine management | Basic | Rename virtual machine and select Schedule a workflow.
5. Select the input values of the workflow, as we already did in the previous section.
6. Click on Next.
7. Give the task a name and maybe a description.
8. Select a start date and time.
9. Choose a reoccurrence from the following options: Run Once, Every Minute, Every Hour, Every Day, Every Week, and Every Month. Whatever you select, there isn't an additional detailed selection possible as with the Orchestrator Client.
10. Select Reoccurrence end date.
    
11. After you click on Finish, the workflow is scheduled.

You can check which workflows are scheduled by clicking on Scheduled Workflows in the main Orchestrator site in the vSphere Web Client. As with the Orchestrator client, you can suspend, resume, edit, and delete. Additionally you can run the workflow now, which is not an option available in the Orchestrator Client.