We’ve completed the vCAC (now rename to vRealize Automation) appliance deployment, installed IaaS components, setup tenants and identity stores.  Now it’s time to get cracking on connecting to some resources that we can use for our applications.  I would like to point out that for this section we’ll be logged in as a user that is both an infrastructure admin as well as a tenant admin.  I’ve also chosen to complete this configuration under my newly created “Neighborhood Watch” tenant.   When adding resources to your tenants, you can do this at the default tenant level and have the sub-tenants use them, or configure the resources at each tenant level.  I would steer away from doing it in both places to make troubleshooting easier at a later date.  I mean, what happens when you’re sharing the same vCenter at the default level as well as the sub-tenant level?  That could get a bit tricky.

Add License Key

Sorry folks, if you are at this stage and don’t have a license key, you’re probably in trouble.  We need to add a valid license key by going to the infrastructure tab –> Administration –> Licensing.  Enter your license key so you can continue with your endpoints.

Credentials

Now that we got those silly licenses taken care of, go to the Infrastructure Tab –> Endpoints –> Credentials.  You’ll need to enter some login information so that you can connect to your endpoints.  This is actually pretty neat because you’ll save these credentials for future use.  Add a new set of credentials by clicking the “+” sign and fill out the information.  A good description and a name are always recommended.  Then enter your a vCenter username and password so you can add the vCenter resources in a future step.  Note: when you’re done entering, be sure to click the green check mark on the left side to save them.  Sometimes I miss this so don’t feel bad if you exited without saving.

vCenter Endpoint

Now we can click on the Endpoint menu and add our vCenter.  Click the “New Endpoint” dropdown and go to Virtual –> vSphere (vCenter) option.

Fill in the information for your vCenter.

NOTE: the endpoin name, must match the agent we configured during the IaaS components install.  If you kept the defaults, you must use the name “vCenter” and YES, the case matters.  Capital “C”

Type in the address of your vCenter.  This should be something like https://vcenter.name/sdk

Select your credentials.  We just created these before, so you can select the button on the right and select the credentials you created.  Click OK to finish the endpoint creation.

At this point I recommend restarting the vCloud Automation Center Agent service on the IaaS server.  This isn’t necessary, but if you don’t do this and immediately go to the next steps, you’ll find out that things don’t look quite right.

Fabric Groups

We’ve connected to our vCenter Endpoint, but now we need to setup a fabric group.  The fabric group is a set of physical resources that we’re going to store our virtual machines.  Go to Infrastructure tab –> Groups –> Fabric Groups.  Click the “New Fabric Group”  option.

Enter a name for the fabric group, and a description.  Then start typing in a name for the fabric administrator.  When you start typing, the field should start populating a list of names that matches the string you’ve entered.  These names are the names from your identity store that we created earlier.  Select a name for the fabric administrator.  Then in the last section select a cluster that you’ll be running your virtual machines on.  If no resources show up, be sure that the credentials you created to connect to the endpoint have access to the resources, and if you didn’t restart the vCAC service this could also cause the resources to be missing.

After you setup the fabric group, go to the Infrastructure Tab –> Endpoints –> Endpoint (yes, I know I said that twice) and look for your compute resources.  Click the dropdown next to the cluster you just added and go to Data Collection.

You’ll notice that the frequency is set to daily.  To speed up this process, we can click “request now” under Inventory, State, and Performance.

Summary

We should now have some resources that we can use for our blueprints but I’m sorry to say, we have to setup some additional policies in our next post before we can do that.  Soon, though.  Soon!