We're using vCAC in our environment to manage provisioning of virtual machines, but we have a number of guest hardware customizations that are performed based on blueprint to cover things vCAC can't do out of the box. Currently this code is implemented as a series C# based vCAC extensibility workflows, but per the VMware product direction we're looking to try to migrate these workflows to vCO.
In our environment we've got a large number of virtual centers which have localized sso and vco instances (vCenter 5.1). Our vCAC instance is also has a localized vCO (5.5.1) deployment. When we configured our vCAC vCO instance with all of the virtual center connections it basically became unusable while waiting for inventory operations to run.
Based on some best practice recommendations it appears the best route to take would be to use the multi-node plugin to execute these workflows on the local vCO instances for each vCenter instead of configuring our vCAC vCO with access to every vCenter instance. The challenge we've got now is that since our vCAC uses vCO 5.5.1 and our vCenter vCO's are largely 5.1.x we cannot use the multi-mode plugin to execute remote workflows as the version mismatch is unsupported.
Has anyone come across an alternative way to execute workflows from a remote vCO instance? The two options I'm currently exploring are either writing my own vCO plugin which has the support I need or building out the integration to execute remote workflows using the REST plugin. Both of those are something I'd rather not do if a better alternative exists.