vRealize Automation 7 – Reservations

vRealize Automation 7 – Reservations

January 25, 2016 15 By Eric Shanks

vRealize Automation 7 uses the concept of reservations to grant a percentage of fabric group resources to a business group. To add a reservation go to Infrastructure –> Reservations. Click the “New” button to add a reservation and then select the type of reservation to be added. Since I’m using a vSphere Cluster, I selected Virtual –> vCenter. Depending on what kind of reservations you’ve selected, the next few screens may be different, but I’m assuming many people will use vSphere so I’ve chosen this for my example.

Enter a Name for the reservation and the tenant (which should already be selected). Next, in the dropdown select your business group that will have access to the reservation. Leave reservation policy empty for now but enter a priority. If a business group has access to more than one reservation, the priority is used to determine which to use up first. Lastly, select “Enable this reservation”. Click “Next”.

vra7-reservations1

On the resources tab, select the compute resource and then we need to add some quotas. Quotas limit how large the reservation will be, so we can limit it by a number of machines, the amount of memory or how much storage is being used. Be sure to enter a memory amount and at least one datastore to be used for deploying cloud resources. Click “Next”.

vra7-reservations2

On the network tab, select the networks that can be used to deploy resources and for now leave the “Network Profile” blank.The bottom section is used with NSX or vCNS but we’ll leave that for another post.vra7-reservations3

On the properties tab, you can add custom properties that will be associated with all catalog items deployed through this reservation. For now we’ll leave this empty. Click “Next”.vra7-reservations4

Lastly, the alerts page we can set the thresholds on when to alert our administrators about resource usage.vra7-reservations5

Summary

Reservations are how we limit our business groups to a certain amount of resources in our cloud. They are necessary to prevent our vSphere environment from being over provisioned with virtual machines and can empower business group managers to handle their own resources instead of the IT Administrators.