The job of a business group is to associate a set of resources with a set of users. Think of it this way, your development team and your production managers likely need to deploy machines to different sets of servers. I should mention that a business group doesn’t do this by itself. Instead it is combined with a reservation which we’ll discuss in the next post. But before we can build those out, lets setup our business groups as well as machine prefixes.

A machine prefix lets us take some sort of string and prepend it to some set of numbers to give us a new machine name. We want to make sure that our machines don’t have the same names so we’ll need a scheme to set them up in some sort of pool like we do with IP addresses. To setup a machine prefix go to Infrastructure –> Administration –> Machine Prefixes. Click the “New” button with the plus sign on it to add a new prefix. Enter a string to be used in the name that will always be added to a new machine name. Next add a number of digits to append to the end of that string, and lastly enter a number for the next machine to start with. In my example below, my next machine would be named “vra7-01” without the quotes.

NOTE: Be sure to click the green check mark after adding this information. It’s easy to click OK at the bottom of the screen without saving the record.

Now that we created the machine prefix, we can add our business group. Go to Administration –> Users and Groups –> Business Groups. Click the “New” button again to add a new group. When the first screen opens, Give the group a name, description and an email address in which to send business group activities. Click “Next”.

Next, we’re presented with a screen to add users to three different roles. The group manager role will entitle the users to blueprints and will manage approval policies. The support role will be users that can provision resources on behalf of the users, and the users role will be a list of users who can request catalog items. Click “Next”.

On the Infrastructure screen, select a machine prefix from the drop down. You don’t have to have a prefix for the group but this is a best practice in case so that each of your blueprints don’t have to have their own assigned. The default prefix can be overridden by the blueprint.

Optionally you can enter an Active Directory container which will house the computer objects if you’re using WIM provisioning. I’ve left this blank since we’re using VMware templates to deploy VMs.

Summary

The business groups are an important piece to deploying blueprints because if a user isn’t in a group, it can’t be entitled to a catalog item. These business groups will likely be your corporate teams that need to self-provision resources and their manager or team leads. In our next post, we’ll assign the business group with some resources, through the use of reservations.