If you’ve followed the series this far, you’ve got your vCAC (now renamed vRealize Automation) appliance deployed and your IaaS components installed.  The tricky parts are over with, and now the fun begins… configurations!  What are you waiting for?  Go login at the http://vcacapplaincename/shell-ui-app/ url.

Add a Tenant

Under Administration –> Tenants, you will see the default tenant which is vsphere.local.  This is the context where you can create additional tenants and should probably be considered to be a “Do Not Touch” tenant.  Even if you’re only going to have a single tenant, it would be a good idea to create a new one just in case.  It’s pretty easy to create more tenants if you make a mistake, but tough to recreate the default tenant.  Click the “+” to create a new tenant.

Give the new tenant a name, remember that a tenant could be a different company, a department, a customer or just about any group you can think of.  In my example, I’ve created a Neighborhood Watch tenant.

Next we setup an identity store to allow access to your vCAC instance.  The identity store will be a list of users that you can assign permission to.  For example below, I’ve configured the hollow.local Active Directory as the identity store.  Fill out a user account that can read from the directory, a connection to the AD Server and a search DN.

You’ll see your identity story listed, but notice that you could add multiple identity stores to a tenant if you’d like to.  If you’ve got multiple Domain’s you need to connect you can do that here.

Next, you will want to setup your administrators.  First, I’d like to mention that you can just start typing in the boxes and a list of users that matches the string you’ve typed in will appear.  Depending on your resources and the connection to the identity server, this may take a second just be patient.

There are two sets of administrators that you’d need to configure.

Tenant Administrators:  This is an admin with access to manage user groups, branding, notifications and approvals and entitlements.

Infrastructure Administrators:  The Infra Admin is responsible for setting up endpoints which basically means all of the connections to resources used by vCloud Automation Center.  Typically the Infrastructure Admin is someone who has some control over the vCenter servers, vCenter Orchestrator, Cloud Services or things like this.

If this is a lab environment, it may be easiest to make the two administrators the same person so that you can easily perform actions for both roles.

Now you’ll see that you’ve got two tenants in the appliance.

Default Tenant Identity store

Just because we don’t want to do much with the default tenant, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t set up an identity store for it.  This allows us to have more than one person login to make changes to the tenants.  We probably don’t want a general login used for the default tenant so that we can properly audit, so an identity store would be a good idea.

We can select the drop down and choose edit on the vsphere.local tenant to add an identity store.  And then run through the same steps as we did with the new tenant.

Summary

We’ve added a new tenant and setup some parameters about who can login to the clouds that we’re creating.  Next up, we should connect vCAC to some resources that we can utilize to build our blueprints.