Your powerful new cloud automation software is up and running, but we need to have some sort of check and balance to be sure that people aren’t creating VMs on a whim because it’s so easy to do.  For this, we can use an approval process.  Maybe a supervisor, or even the CIO can approval the additional resources.

Approval Policies

To setup an approval policy, login as a Tenant Administrator and go to the Administration Tab –> Approval Policies.  Click the familiar green “+” icon to add a new policy.

You’ll need to select an approval policy type from the drop down list.  There are quite a few that are available to pick from, but I used the Catalog Item Request which is pretty broad reaching.

Enter a descriptive name for the approval policy and a description.  Be sure to make the policy “Active”.  When you’re done, you’ll need to add a pre-approval or post-approval level.  For most cases, the Pre Approval would make the most sense.  Click the green “+” icon to add a new level.

Enter a level name.  Keep in mind that a single request could go through multiple levels such as a supervisor level, then the IT level, then an executive level or whatever makes sense for the organization.  We’ll keep it simple here and only create one level.

You can select “always required” or setup some conditions on when this type of approval is needed such as if the VM has more than 10 GB or RAM or whatever.  Enter the approvers and determine if all of them need to approve this, or just one person can approve it.

Once done you’ll see an approval policy that look something like this.  Click Add.

Now we need to go to the Administration Tab –> Catalog Management –> Entitlements and modify the entitlements that require an approval.  I’ve select the Windows OS Service and the windows servers.

Just click the drop down next to the entitlement and change the policy.  The drop down should show a list of policies that you can use.  Be sure to use descriptive names so that if you have many approval policies this isn’t a nightmare to manage.

If we make a request now on one of the items we set an approval policy on, you’ll notice the status almost immediately goes to “Pending Approval”.

Whomever the approver is, should see a message in their inbox stating that an approval is waiting.  The drop down on the approval will allow actions to be taken.

The request could be approved or rejected with a comment that will be seen by the requester.

Summary

Approvals are going to be a necessary thing if your IaaS is going to be successful.  Departments and groups will run amok if there aren’t proper controls put on all of the blueprints.