Model vRA for Multiple Lab Environments

[dgerolymatos]

Hi all,

Can someone please help me get started in modelling my vRA 7.2 blueprints, reservation policies etc?

I want to use vRA to provide IaaS for an engineering team to host multiple PoC environments in parallel. A vRA user may need access to request machines in POC1 and POC3, but not POC2, for example.

• I have vCenter and vRO Endpoints configured
• I have a POC Fabric Group
• I have set up AD groups: "POC1 Admins", "POC1 Users", "POC2 Admins", "POC2 Users" etc
• I have set up Business Groups: "POC1 Business Group", "POC2 Business Group" etc
• I have reservations: POC1 Reservation, POC2 Reservation etc
• I have Network Profiles: POC1-VLANx, POC2-VLANy etc
• I have Reservation Policies: POC1 Res, POC2 Res etc
• I have Blueprints for W2K12 and CentOS
• I have AD Policies AD_POC1, AD_POC2 etc
• I have created separate Services: POC1, POC2 etc

The objective is to add a user to an AD group for the respective POC (e.g. POC1 Users), then they automatically get the entitlement to request either blueprint which gets deployed on the respective reservation. I don't want to have separate blueprints for each POC, or the user to have to select an item from a drop-down at request time as to which POC environment to deploy to. The problem with this is that they may select POC3 during the request, but not be entitled to use that POC.

Can someone please help me join the dots?

[GrantOrchardVMw]

Entitlements are "bound" (for lack of a better word) to a Business Group. So if your users are added to an AD group, that is a member of only one Business Group then you will get the exact behaviour that you are describing, using a single Entitlement per Business Group.

[dgerolymatos]

Hi, thanks for your reply.

Yes, this will entitle the users but will it fix the issue of having to make a separate blueprint for each reservation?

What I'd like to do is:

- User who is a member of the AD group "POC1 Users" gets entitled to use the W2K12 blueprint which gets provisioned on the "POC1 Reservation"

- User who is a member of the AD group "POC2 Users" gets entitled to use the same W2K12 blueprint which gets provisioned on the "POC2 Reservation"

- do the above without having a drop down to choose the reservation at request time

[dgerolymatos]

If I created a separate reservation and reservation policy for each placement option, I could still have a single blueprint if I could somehow dynamically change the reservation policy binding of the blueprint during the request time (based on business group).

Does this sound like a workable approach? Does anyone know how to do this?

[GrantOrchardVMw]

Right, now I understand your question.

Blueprints aren't bound to a Reservation. You can constrain them to a given Reservation Policy if you so desire, but the default behaviour is that they can provision to any Reservation that would have access to the underlying template.