Override valuelist on property in blueprint

[jselleck]

I'm using a dropdown to drive available options for VirtualMachine.Network0.Name and VirtualMachine.Disk0.Storage.  This is setup with a relationship and valueexpressions.

This works great!  Except now I'm provisioning to a different cluster with different names for Network and Storage.

Is there a way to change the valuelist on a property for a blueprint?

If not do you have any ideas how we might overcome this limitation?

[SkyCoop]

How are the blueprints mapping to the clusters - Reservation Policies or Location Dropdown?

OOTB - vRA isn't really good at presenting properties to a user and having them drive where the resources land, you usually end up with a bunch of blueprints or writing vRO workflows to handle things.

You could override the Vrm.Datacenter.Location custom property, assign a location tag to each cluster, in the property dictionary add Vrm.Datacenter.Location as a dropdown list and use it as a parent to the network / and datastore cluster options? Doesn't work if each users have different networks that they should see.

The VirtualMachine.Network0.Name could be updated in the BuildingMachine vRO state transition using the vCAC plugin for Orchestrator based on the values in the request, if you haven't done anything in vRO yet, it is a good first step and not difficult.

[jselleck]

I do most of the work in VCO.  This is the first addition of another cluster.

I drive the available networks/storage selections based on a custom property.  The disk and storage Properties have a valueexpression that updates the selections based on the chosen custom property value.

I.E. Tier PRoperty:  Tier1/Tier2 selection will present different options for storage and network.  Now we need to add cluster as a factor.  I.E. Cluster 1 will have Tier 1 and Tier 2 options for network/storage.  Could location present different dropdown options for location based on cluster?

I can do this in vco - though I have thus far not been able to change vcac:virtualmachine properties (besides passing back vmname to iaas).  It sounds like you have had luck here. Some direction on this would be helpful.

See my other post for things I've tried: Set StoragePath in VCO during WFStubBuildingMachine

Thanks!

[SkyCoop · Accepted solution]

To update a property from vRO, vCAC 6.1 - Update a Custom Property from vCO - Realize.net

To update an array of properties from vRO (this builds on the previous post) - vCAC 6.1 - Generic Blueprint With vCO - Realize.net

Those posts don't meet your use case, but shows you how to update properties from vRO, which hopefully helps out?

You will find somethings can't be updated in the BuildingMachine state, or rather can be updated, but will be ignored. Network Profiles is one that comes to mind, updating VirtualMachine.Network0.ProfileName in building machine occurs after the IP information has already been allocated during the request.

[jselleck]

Thanks for the help.  I was able to overcome this with VCO and assigning the properties in my stubs.

-Justin