You’ve created your blueprints and entitled users to use them. How do we get them to show up in our service catalog? How do we make them look pretty and organized? For that, we need to look at managing catalog items. Log in as a tenant administrator and go to the Administration Tab –> Catalog Management –> Catalog Items. From here, we’ll need to look for the blueprint that we’ve previously published. Click on the blueprint. ...
An entitlement is how we assign users a set of catalog items. Each of these entitlements can be managed by the business group manager or a tenant administrator can manage entitlements for all business groups in their tenant. To create a new entitlement go to Administration tab –> Catalog Management –> Entitlements. Click the “New” button to add a new entitlement. Under the General tab, enter a name for the entitlement and a description. Change the status to “Active” and select a Business Group. Note: If only a single business group has been created, this will not be selectable since it will default to the only available group. Then select the users who will be part of this entitlement. ...
Blueprints are arguably the thing you’ll spend most of your operational time dealing with in vRealize Automation. We’ve finally gotten most of the setup done so that we can publish our vSphere templates in vRA. To create a blueprint in vRealize Automation 7 go to the “Design” tab. Note: If you’re missing this tab, be sure you added yourself to the custom group with permissions like we did in a previous post, and that you’ve logged back into the portal after doing so. ...
If you’ve been reading the whole series of posts on vRealize Automation 7, then you’ll know that we’ve already been setting up roles in our cloud portal, but we’re not done yet. If you need any permissions besides just requesting a blueprint, you’ll need to be added to a custom group first. To create a custom group, login as a tenant administrator and go to the Administration Tab –> Users and Groups –> Custom Groups. From there click the “New” button to add a new custom group. ...
Services might be a poor name for this feature of vRealize Automation 7. When I think of a service, I think of some sort of activity that is being provided but in the case of vRA a service is little more than a category or type. For example, I could have a service called “Private Cloud” and put all of my vSphere blueprints in it and another one called “Public Cloud” and put all of my AWS blueprints in it. In the screenshot below you can see the services in a catalog. If you highlight the “All Services” service, it will show you all blueprints regardless of their service category. Otherwise, selecting a specific service will show you only the blueprints in that category. ...
vRealize Automation 7 uses the concept of reservations to grant a percentage of fabric group resources to a business group. To add a reservation go to Infrastructure –> Reservations. Click the “New” button to add a reservation and then select the type of reservation to be added. Since I’m using a vSphere Cluster, I selected Virtual –> vCenter. Depending on what kind of reservations you’ve selected, the next few screens may be different, but I’m assuming many people will use vSphere so I’ve chosen this for my example. ...
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. ...
In the last post we setup an vCenter endpoint that defines how our vRealize Automation solution will talk to our vSphere environment. Now we must create a fabric group. Fabric Groups are a way of segmenting our endpoints into different types of resources or to separate them by intent. These groups are mandatory before you can build anything so don’t think that since you don’t need to segment your resources, that you can get away with not creating one. ...
Now that we’ve setup our new tenant, lets login as an infrastructure admin and start assigning some resources that we can use. To do this we need to start by adding an endpoint. An endpoint is anything that vRA uses to complete it’s provisioning processes. This could be a public cloud resource such as Amazon Web Services, an external orchestrator appliance, or a private cloud hosted by Hyper-V or vSphere. ...
Now it’s time to create a new tenant in our vRealize Automation portal. Let’s login to the portal as the system administrator account as we have before. Click the Tenants tab and then click the “New” button. Give the new tenant a name and a description. Then enter a URL name. This name will be appended to this string: https://[vraappliance.domain.name]/vcac/org/ and will be the URL that users will login to. In my example the url is https://vra7.hollow.local/vcac/org/labtenant. Click “Submit and Next”. ...