Is it possible to rename a vm built with vCAC in vCAC?

[chrisheartland]

I thought this would be fairly easy i.e. it would be in the Items -> Machines and either actions/edit option form the drop down. I don't see anything that would allow me to rename a VM in vCAC (at least from Items view). Does anyone know if this is possible and if so how?

Edit: I'm assuming that just renaming the machine at the OS level is not good enough in that vCAC wouldn't know about the change. If this isn't the case and it would pick up the change from an OS level rename, then that's also what I need to know. So, that's another question I would have if not: What happens in vCAC if you rename the machine at the OS level?

[VirExprt · Accepted solution]

Hey there!!!

There is no option available to rename a VM after it got provisioned from vCAC, why would you need VM to be renamed if you have already chosen VM Prefix, if you do not like to use the prefix works, you can custom property to provide name to the VM while requesting for it.

If you,by any circumstance, choose to change name of the VM, and the DNS name is also populated with new name, here is the good news for ya , vCAC detects the name change at OS level and rename the VM in vCAC console but the bad news is the Folder name at datastore level still remains old which could give administrators tough time to track VM from huge list of other VMs.

Hope this should help you!!!

Br,

MG

[chrisheartland]

Thanks for the reply. To give you an answer, the reason we need to do this is we have teams that have a need for constantly changing application codes. They are never the same and can be anything at any time. If I let them add them to the applications list themselves, it would get out of hand rather quickly. I would have to constantly be removing old entries. I'd rather not have to do that.

This way, I would let them provision a generic app name like "app" and let them then manually rename to whichever app code they are needing at the time. They also have admin access to vCenter so they could also rename the VM which would prevent the administrator overhead of not knowing which VM is which.

Also, I mean, I could think of other reasons to want to change the name. Let's say I'm migrating from one machine to another but want to keep the same name. To do this, I'd have to change the original VM name to "-x" or something, then migrate my data and rename the new server to the original name. If you can't rename in vCAC when doing this type of a procedure it can get out of hand quickly if vCAC doesn't recognize the changes.

[stvkpln]

How is it detecting that name change.... and is this only done during a data collection cycle? If so (by default), it'd take 24 hours for that name change to show up in vCAC, wouldn't it?

[GrantOrchardVMw]

Yeah, this does sound like a good option for a vCO workflow as a Day 2 action. Rename the guest and the vCenter object, then kick off an inventory collection so that it propogates into the vCAC UI.

The second use case (migration) I'm not so sold on. I'd prefer (in an ideal world) for that content to exist in a repository somewhere and have it imported/deployed as part of post provisioning.

Grant

[stvkpln]

Another thought... couldn't the software build (or whatever the variable) be a custom property that adjusts the name during the provisioning process (say during BuildingMachine)? That way, it happens at build, but then you don't have the mess of cleaning up values all over the place? Not sure if that's feasible for the specific problem / use case, but something that I thought of at 11:20 at night!

And, actually... thinking about it... does the CAFE database take it's cues on object names (and such) from IaaS, or is it an independent value that only references an IaaS record? If the two aren't implicitly tied, that could get ugly pretty quick. If the data collection sorts it all out, cool.