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mstefani77
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vRA 8.1 - Ownership and Projects

In 7.x there was a built-in action to change the owner of a deployment from one user to another.  I believe there was also a way to change the business group of a deployment by changing the reservation as well.  In 8.x we can't seem to find anything around those topics.  It seems like functionality you'd need to have.  If the owner of a deployment quits or changes departments how are you supposed to handle that in vRA 8?  I'm hoping we're just missing something obvious.

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Lalegre
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Same as before I could not find it inside the platform and I tried everything, also nothing mentioned on the documentation. Maybe is it possible doing some custom scripts but not sure. However if you want to try the requestor action i suggest to create a dummy AD user, create some deployments, run some actions and then delete it and try to modify everything with a new user.

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Lalegre
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Hey mstefani77​,

I think here comes the changes regarding the product and the new structure. There are no more owners of the resources so if you are a member of the project you can run whatever action you want between the objects of the same project. If you have concerns on how to control that then the question is the use of 2 Day Action policies and approvals to restrict the members to run whatever without permissions or restrictions.

The project concept is slighty different as the Business Group one but it depends how you construct it. You can think of the project like a department where you hold multiple actual projects but there will be more difficult to segregate permissions or hide deployments. Also you can think of them to actual projects where those deployments are part of for example the anual IT project for a new application and only those users have permissions there.

Here is a link of the permissions to understand the projects roles in combination with the Organization roles: What are the vRealize Automation user roles

Having said that, there is no way of change the owner of the deployment as it does not have one it is just the requestor (at least i could not find it).

Finally, regarding what you said about changing the Business Group on vRA 7.x, there is no way to do that without touching the database or un-registering and registering the deployment again with Bulk Import. However you are right that you can change the owner with an action but only between members of the same Business Group.

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mstefani77
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Sounds like the requestor might not be a big deal then.  Hopefully there's no issue with the requestor / owner of a deployment not being in AD anymore.  I know we've ran into that in 7.x where if the owner is gone certain actions fail, I think even expirations used to fail as it would throw an error for the user not being retrievable.  Any idea if 8 has a way to unregister the VM and re-add via bulk import / onboarding the same way 7 did for those cases where a deployment does need to be moved to a different project?

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Lalegre
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Same as before I could not find it inside the platform and I tried everything, also nothing mentioned on the documentation. Maybe is it possible doing some custom scripts but not sure. However if you want to try the requestor action i suggest to create a dummy AD user, create some deployments, run some actions and then delete it and try to modify everything with a new user.

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emacintosh
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We ran into a similar situation today.  As I understand it, functionality to re-assign a project may be coming in the next release or two, but it's not an option in 8.1 

I did find that in the postgres db changing the project_id in the catalog-db.dep_deployment table for a deployment was reflected in the web, but I'm going to assume that's not supported...and I didn't do any other functionality validation other than seeing that it changed.  In other words, maybe there's still a reference to the old project in some other table that could break functionality elsewhere.

In our case, we onboarded a lot of servers to the wrong project.  But since we were just standing up our non-prod environment, we decided to remove the cloud accounts.  Once they were gone, the deployments went into a "missing" state.  At that point, we just deleted the deployments knowing they would remain in vcenter.  We have not tried to re-onboard any yet though, so I can't say if they will come back in cleanly.

mstefani77
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How did the onboarding process work out for you?  We're still testing out functionality in 8.1, but plan on cutting over our 7.4 environment by the end of the year.  Onboarding is the next piece I need to look at.  We're planning on skipping the whole migration wizard and just starting fresh in 8.1, move a lot of vRO work over and then just import the workloads.

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emacintosh
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As far as bringing them over to the right project, we'll know more after the next attempt.  We have them all tagged in vcenter, so it should be pretty straight forward.  But I think it will be a plan per project, per cloud account...which could be a lot in our case. 

But as far as them coming over as deployments, that seemed to work really well.  I didn't time it, but I think we had 6500 deployments in an hour or so.  Admittedly, that wasn't my task so I wasn't  paying as much attention to it.

We're a 7.5 shop and are probably just ahead of you in our 8.1 rollout.  But we have a similar plan - build new in 8.1, reusing what we can from vRO.

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