vRA tenant creation design assistance

[HiteshSujanani]

Hi All,

I have 2 vsphere clusters in a vcenter endpoint "Gold" and "Silver" cluster. The "Gold" Cluster is for production worload  VMs and the "Silver" cluster is for Dev/Test workload VMs.

Use case is to have a drop down in the catalog request form to select "Production" or "Dev/Test" and have the VMs build in the correct cluster.

I have only 1 tenant. Should I create 1 fabric group with both the resources of "Gold" and "Silver" cluster compute resource, have 1 reservation to map the compute resources to my business group? Or is there some other approach suggested for this?

Also, after creating a blueprint, I will need to create a dynamic value for "Production" and "Dev/test". The dynamic value will need to be pointed to action in vRO which will help selecting the cluster based on the input. Please assist with pointing me to some resource that will help me in creating the action item.

I am just beginning to work on the product.. Any suggestions and input will be highly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[qc4vmware]

vRA has a lot of options for doing the sort of thing you've mentioned.  There is some out of the box functionality you can use called location where  you could have a "Gold" and "Silver" location.  With extensibility options you can also do some things with custom properties on your reservations.  You could have separate blueprints one for gold/silver.  It is a little difficult to steer you one way or another without fully understand your business rules, scope of your implementation, etc.  Take a look at the documentation around Location and see if that will meet your needs.

[HiteshSujanani]

Thank you for the response qc4vmware. By the "location" functionality, do you mean creating xml similar to the link below. I'm sorry, but I do not find any documentation regarding the "location" out of box functionality of vRA, please can you assist with pointing me to a link that will help.

Javascript: Parsing XML and JSON - Pierrelx's LAB

If the user wants a catalog request form to have a drop down for "production" and "dev/test" . Would it be possible to do it via reservation and custom property? If I plan on using reservation, from what I understand I will need to create 2 blueprints and map the necessary compute resource reservation "Gold" and "Silver" to "Production" and "Dev/test" respectively. Can I use reservation and have a drop down for "production" and "dev/test"?

Thanks in advance.

[qc4vmware · Accepted solution]

No, I was referring to this method https://docs.vmware.com/en/vRealize-Automation/7.5/com.vmware.vra.prepare.use.doc/GUID-CC9FE0C2-E77C... but that article goes into a more advanced way of presenting choices in a blueprint.  Like I said you have MANY paths to do what you'd like to do but its difficult to steer you one way or another.  You might want to start here and location along with how you define your reservations and how you manage your blueprints might get you there all without needing to create and customizations.

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[HiteshSujanani]

Thank you for the assistance qc4vmware. 

[bryanvaneeden]

Maybe a bit late, but yes this is absolutely possible. I've implemented a dropdown on a blueprint on my environment, that selects a reservation (and in return a storage flavor) based upon Reservation Policies.

You can create a Reservation Policy, link it to your Gold/Silver reservations. Next up you would have to create a Property Definition, which is dynamically filled with "external values" from a default script in vRO which recollects all reservations that specific tenant can use. And lastly you need to map this property to the Blueprint.

So basically what this does is that it creates a dynamically (on-the-fly) created dropdown list in the blueprint request form, in which you are able to select your reservation.

If I've read your question correctly, this is what you wanted right? 

Let me know if you have any more questions!

[HiteshSujanani]

Thank you for the response Bryan.

The requirement is a little different. There are 3 clusters in vcenter(Gold, Silver(Location A), Silver(Location B)).. Attached diagram has details of the use case requirement.

The Gold cluster is a vSAN stretched cluster between location A and Location B.

There is a Silver vSAN cluster in Location A

There is a Silver vSAN cluster in Location B.

The use case is to give the user an option to select "Gold" or "Silver" tier in the request form, bind the input for the user to select either "Location A" or Location B" and have the server deployed in an ESXi Host or the correct cluster based on the selection.

Plan is to have 2 reservation, 1 for "Gold" and 1 for "Silver"(with both location silver clusters). Can you please provide some input regarding this. Would it be possible for you to share the script in vRO which collects the reservation from the tenant? Thanks.