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vRealize Automation 7.1 – Create Endpoints & Fabric Groups (Part 3)

Before creating the Business Group we firstly need to create a Machine Prefix which can be used by the Business Group to create IaaS resources.

1. Create a Machine Prefix

VMware Machine Prefix Definition: You use machine prefixes to generate the names of provisioned machines. Machine prefixes are shared across all tenants. You should assign a default machine prefix to every business group that you expect to need IaaS resources. Every blueprint must have a machine prefix or use the group default prefix. Fabric administrators are responsible for managing machine prefixes. More detail on Machine Prefixes here.

Login as a Fabric Admin (which we created in the previous post) to create the machine prefix:

Navigate to ‘Infrastructure->Administration->Machine Prefixes’ and click ‘New’:

Provide a ‘Name’ which will be used for the hostname of the VM, in this case I am creating a windows VM which will have a limit of 15 chars. So in this example the first VM created by this Business Group will have a hostname of ‘ppsilver-win001‘ and will max out at after provisioning VM ‘ppsilver-win999‘. Click on the green tick in order to save the prefix:

2. Create a Business Group

VMware Business Group Definition: A business group associates a set of services and resources to a set of users, often corresponding to a line of business, department, or other organizational unit. More detail on Business Groups here.

Login as a Tenant Admin:

Navigate to ‘Administration->Users&Groups->Business Groups’ and click ‘New’:

Enter a group name and email address for the group manager:

In the Members section add the Group Manager who will be able to create entitlements later and a User who will be able to request service catalog items for which they have entitlements:

Select the Machine Prefix created earlier and click ‘Ok’ to finish creating the Business Group :

New Business Group created named ‘DevOps’, as you can see zero resources have been allocated, the following step ‘Create a reservation’ will assign resources to this Business Group:

3. Create a vSphere Reservation

Nice flow chart from vmware.com detailing the IaaS and Fabric Admin roles in this sequence ending with the creation of a reservation:

Login with the ‘Fabric Admin user which has permission to create reservations and select resources associated with the fabric group created earlier:

Navigate to ‘Infrastructure->Reservations->Reservations’ and click ‘New’:

From the drop down list select ‘vSphere’:

In the General tab enter a name for the reservation, select the Tenant and Business Group created earlier which we are assigning this reservation to, and select the appropriate priority:

Select the ‘Compute resource’ (ESXi cluster), no. of allowed powered on VM’s for this reservation, and allocate the required amount of ‘Memory (GB)’  and ‘Storage (GB)’ which will be the target datastore used to provision VM’s :

Select the required ‘Network Path’, the Advanced Settings section provides options for NSX:

Custom properties can be added if required:

Set the thresholds for when to alert the Business Group Manager (devops_manager in this example):

Reservation Created!: