topic Re: How do you create a vm with no disks in VRA 7 in VMware Aria Automation Tools Discussions

How do you create a vm with no disks in VRA 7

jakubjs — Wed, 16 Nov 2016 21:22:37 GMT

I'm trying to create a vm that has no disks attached to it during the request phase. I've build a new blueprint with "BuildVMWorkflow". The issue is that if I set Maximum volumes to 0 (which according to the help is suppose to disable adding any volumes), the minimum storage in the resources tab is set to 0. However it has to be 1 or greater for the blueprint to be accepted as valid. Anyone know of how this should work?

cheers,

Jakub

Re: How do you create a vm with no disks in VRA 7

TimR26 — Tue, 22 Nov 2016 13:13:38 GMT

I've never tried this so I'm just talking out of my @$$ but the blueprint requires at least one disk so build your machine with one disk. When the blueprint is deployed, include a script/workflow to power off the machine and delete the disk.

I'm sure there is a better way and I'll look into it, but this is just an idea to get the gears spinning.

Re: How do you create a vm with no disks in VRA 7

kallischlauch — Thu, 24 Nov 2016 21:37:50 GMT

i have to ask. what are you going to do with that machine if it has no disk?

i was thinking to create a blueprint with one disk, export it with cloudclient, remove disk, reimport. just by chance that might work.

Re: How do you create a vm with no disks in VRA 7

jakubjs — Thu, 24 Nov 2016 21:42:54 GMT

Hi.

Yes I ended up doing that, remove disk before poweron and add my own disks and other vm mods. its just I have a disk entry in the catalog item which is not a clean interface. Maybe I just hide it all with XAAS blueprint instead.

Re: How do you create a vm with no disks in VRA 7

jakubjs — Thu, 24 Nov 2016 21:47:24 GMT

Well there is many things I could do with a diskless machine. Could always net boot :-). But in my case I'm building a large amount of clones (compute nodes) using the same disk in non-permissive mode. This makes my clone deployment really quick. I'm trying to move my implementation from pure vcenter perl api to a vra blueprint. I've managed to add an existing vmdk to my vm using vro as well as remove the original but I don't really want the option to be shown to the end users.