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HiteshSujanani
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

vRA assistance

Hi All,

Kindly assist..

Attached is a flowchart of what I want to see on the request form..

I have 2 clusters, "Gold" cluster and "Silver" cluster.  Require dynamic options on the request form,for "Production" the servers must be deployed on the "Gold" vsphere cluster and on selecting "Pre-Production" the servers must be deployed on the "Silver" cluster.

The Gold cluster is a stretched VSAN cluster having 4 host in "location A" and 4 host in "location B", also want a "select location" dropdown that will dynamically place the VM on the specified location host and a silver cluster(not stretched) that will have 2 clusters, 1 per location.

I looked into VRA location options, the location option will help me deploy in Gold or silver cluster, but with the streched cluster and 2 different location, not sure on how this can be approached. Attached is a flow that I created.

Any help will be really appreciated

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daphnissov
Immortal
Immortal

The way I've done exactly this in the past (vSAN stretched cluster deployment) is to use a conditional on the custom form. Based on the location, an addition field is displayed to select the site (if the location is the one with a vSAN stretch). That field essentially attaches a SovLabs DRS profile to the request steering it to one DRS group versus another. If it lands in that DRS group, it runs on that side. And this is determined dynamically based on the request. No vRO coding is required.

HiteshSujanani
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Thank you for the response Daphnissov.

I have a couple of questions, kindly let me know if you have any input on these.

There is a need to have service now as a front end to request for services(so we will not be requesting via vRA catalog), is custom forms supported by the service now plugin for vRA. Per the attached plugin documentation(page 29, second last point), it states that I will not be able to use custom forms. If I am unable to use the custom forms, I can use the location xml feature for the "Gold" and "Silver" cluster right?

Please let me know if the Sovlabs DRS workflow is free to use or is there a cost? I may not be able to get a budget for this.. What I can think of is creating 2 Host to VM groups for each site with a "should" affinity rule for VM to Host mapping. Then create a workflow to add the VM based on the input to the correct VM group after the machine provisioning phase of the event broker. Do you know if adding the VM to the VM group with the "should" rule will trigger a vmotion to have the VM on the Host in the correct site.

Thanks in advance

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HiteshSujanani
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Thank you for the response Sany.

The workflow I believe might help, but adding a DNS entry for all Host of a site (to "Datacenter1" for instance) might be difficult as this will need to be done for all future host.

If we have a VM-Host should rule and add the VM to the group will that not be sufficient.

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daphnissov
Immortal
Immortal

I am not familiar with that ITSM plug-in, but custom forms from vRA's side probably won't work with it. I don't know about the location XML file, but that's rarely used these days.

Regarding the SovLabs DRS module, there is a free trial available but otherwise it's paid software. If you do not use it, you will be required to manually write a vRO workflow that adds a given machine to a VM group. The "should" statement should cause it to be vMotioned to the applicable group.

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