In this vCAC (now renamed vRealize Automation) series, we’ve got access to some of our resources now after connecting our vCenter Endpoint, so now we want to create some policies to control how our new VMs will be deployed.

Machine Prefixes

We’ll be creating a lot of new virtual machines so we’ll want to put a prefix on all these machines so we can identify them.  You can have more than one prefix so that you can have different prefixes by department, company, user or so on.

Go to the Infrastructure tab –>  Blueprints –> Blueprints and you’ll notice that we’re getting some warnings that the prefixes and business groups are added yet.  Let’s go do this quick and we’ll be ready to create a blueprint.  Click the Manage Machine Prefixes link to go straight there.

Add a new machine prefix by clicking the “New Machine Prefix”.  Enter your prefix, the number of digits that will be appended at the end, and what number you should start counting from.  For instance a VM created from the example below would look like “hollow-01” and the next “hollow-02” and so on.

Business Groups

We also saw that we need a business group.  This would be a group of users who you can assign a resource to.  Go to Infrastructure Tab –> Groups –> Business Groups and select the “New Business Group” link.

Enter a name for the group, I’ve used a group called the “NightWatch” which will be a subset of my organization “Neighborhood Watch”.  Select the machine prefix that you created earlier.  You must also enter a group manager role.  This is someone who will be able to manage the machines and add blueprints to the group.  Then you can setup a manager who will get email alerts, it might be good to put in a distribution list instead of a single email address for this one.  Also, you can setup a support role who can be used as a helpdesk group for users who are having issues.

You’ll also notice a custom properties section that can be a bit confusing.  These are attributes of the VMs that can be applied to all the blueprints.  For instance I’ve used the VMware.VirtualCenter.Folder property to set which VMware folder the VMs will be put into.

For more information on properties please see the vCAC 6 documentation.

Reservation Policies

Now we need to set some reservations.  These policies are restrictions on how many resources can be utilized.  Go to Infrastructure tab –> Reservations –> Reservation Policies.  Click the “New Reservation Policy” link.

Once you’re done, add a Storage Reservation Policy as well.

Next, click on the Network Profiles and add a new one.  Choose “External” to use the networks already included in your vSphere environment.

Enter a name for the network profile and then enter the subnet, gateway and DNS information associated with this network.  Also setup WINS (if you really must).

Click over the the IP Ranges tab and enter a name and a list of IP Addresses that the machine blueprints will be using when you deploy them.

When you’re all done, you’ll see the list of IPs and their allocation.

Now, go to the Reservations Tab and click “New Reservation –> Virtual –> vSphere (vCenter)”.

Now we’re going to add some compute resources.  Select the cluster, give the reservation a name, and select which tenant.  Select a business group that will be using this reservation, and select the policy to assign this to.  Set a priority which will only matter if you’ve got more than one reservation.

Click over to the Resources tab and you’ll need to select an amount of memory and one or more datastores that will hold the VMs.

On the Network tab, select the network profile that you created earlier.

Lastly, select the alerts tab and set the alert notification thresholds the way that you see fit.

Summary

We’ve gone through a lot to put up some boundries on how VMs will be provisioned.  Let’s FINALLY start building some blueprints in our next post!