Business group custom properties lost in Multi-Machine Blueprint

[willonit]

I have several custom properties that are defined in my business groups. When I deploy a single machine blueprint those properties are passed into orchestrator where I use them. However, when I add the same blueprints into a multi machine blueprint, the properties defined in the business group are no longer there. Has anyone else experienced this or know why those properties would not follow the request in a multi machine scenario?

Thanks

[ross_davies]

Hi,

I have experienced the same issue - I'm on vCAC 6.0.1.1. I have a case open with VMware support (14479882305) who have also replicated this issue on their test environment, I have also had a call with their engineering team to demo the problem.

This case has been open for over 1 month now and no resolution is in sight - if you can raise a case and contact your support rep to help build pressure to resolve this I'd appreciate it!

Many thanks,

Ross

[admin]

What are you trying to achieve? you could orchestrate multi machine entities easily using the vCAC Designer and a blogpost I created for that use case:
http://elasticskies.com/building-vcac-multi-machine-workflows/

[willonit]

Here is an example: a business group has a custom property BG.adGroup that contains the name of a group in AD that I would like to add as the local administrator to the machine. I have 2 single machine blue prints (SMBP) and already have a stub workflow that runs when a single machine is created and works. It gets the property BG.adGroup and uses its value to complete the rest of the workflow. When I make a multi machine blue print (MMBP) containing 1 of each of my SMBPs then request that service the custom property BU.adGroup gets added to the "MasterMachine" but not the "Child Machines" however my stub still runs as it should to customize the SMBP. But, it can not find the property BG.adGroup because it is not included in the properties array that is passed to vCO to complete the stub workflow.

oKushmaro, you note in your article that "When you apply a custom property to a Multi Machine blueprint, it applies to all component virtual machines as well" however it appears that the custom properties are applied to the MMBP object but not the children. Is there a way with designer to add that to the properties array of the children?

[ross_davies]

From what we have found while working on this with VMware support cutsom properties that have been added to business groups get added to the multimachine blueprint but are not inherited to the child machines of the multimachine blueprint.

The last I heard from VMware engineering they were trying to decide whether that was normal behavior or not... For what its worth I argued that it should not be normal behavior!

[willonit]

I have the same findings and agree it should be normal behavior if it is not.

Have you heard anything else from VMware?

[ross_davies]

VMware support updated the case this morning. It will require a code change to fix and they are currently investigating how best to fix the issue.

If you guys are seeing this, please raise a support case & talk to your account team. The more of us who report this, the quicker I suspect it'll be worked into 6.0.1.2! :smileygrin:

[willonit]

I have found a work around for this issue. Since reservations are tied to specific business groups, if you put the custom properties on the reservation they will be work for multi-machine blueprint components. I still do not think that the business group properties not being applied to MMBP components is good but applying them to the reservation will work for now.

[willonit · Accepted solution]

This has been resolved with 6.1 and higher