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BillStreet00
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Blueprint Sprawl

I have five clusters in vCenter, six business groups and I need blueprints for windows 2012 and 2016.  Let's call one of my clusters "sample".  I would like to create a single windows 2012 blueprint that all of my business groups can use.  I'm kind of at a loss.  I have storage policies being pulled into my blueprints, network names and folder selections for where VM's would be provisioned into within vCenter.  However I cannot seem to find a good way to limit my blueprints. I have no desire to manage 60 odd blueprints.  Has anyone come up with a good way to resolve this?

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daphnissov
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Without knowing more about how you've set up your tenant, it's difficult to give precise recommendations. Generally speaking, though, you can create only a single Windows 2012 blueprint and have that accessible to each of your business groups simply by setting up an entitlement that allows them to provision from that. If, for example, a user is a member of multiple business groups, they'll see two copies of that catalog item with a gray label underneath the title that names the business group to which it applies. You can further reduce sprawl by having a drop-down list in the presentation form (if you so wish) that allows a user to set any of your five clusters. And in vRA 7.3 with component profiles, you can create an image profile that allows a user to pick 2012 or 2016 without dedicating a blueprint to each. So best case scenario is you only have one blueprint for all six business groups for all five clusters and for both Windows operating systems.

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daphnissov
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Without knowing more about how you've set up your tenant, it's difficult to give precise recommendations. Generally speaking, though, you can create only a single Windows 2012 blueprint and have that accessible to each of your business groups simply by setting up an entitlement that allows them to provision from that. If, for example, a user is a member of multiple business groups, they'll see two copies of that catalog item with a gray label underneath the title that names the business group to which it applies. You can further reduce sprawl by having a drop-down list in the presentation form (if you so wish) that allows a user to set any of your five clusters. And in vRA 7.3 with component profiles, you can create an image profile that allows a user to pick 2012 or 2016 without dedicating a blueprint to each. So best case scenario is you only have one blueprint for all six business groups for all five clusters and for both Windows operating systems.

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BillStreet00
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Thanks.  I will start digging into the profiles as I am running on 7.3.

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BillStreet00
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Profiles worked like a charm.  The only piece I need now is to be able to select which cluster resource to use when provisioning.

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BillStreet00
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I have not seen anything yet but are you limited to two blueprints in the image section?  I see nothing starting with my third template.  I've been digging around and have not found anything on it yet.

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daphnissov
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No, you're not limited to just two. The catch to using the image profiles is you can't re-use templates that are declared in static blueprints. In other words, if you've declared "template1" in a blueprint that doesn't use an image profile, you can't use "template1" as part of an image profile. At least, this is how I've found the system works.

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BillStreet00
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I kept mine simple.  I have three template.  Windows 2012 and 16 running on ver 13 virtual hardware and one running a legacy version of hardware. I used Grant Orchard's post on dynamic reservations.  I used Postman to pull in the reservation policy guiid's and presto.

Still having some fine tuning issues.  I use storage profiles pulled in with SPBM however it seems to bypass my storage reservations.  Same with pulling in networks.  I need a way to filter storage and network so requester's only see what they are entitled to.

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