vRA 7 Catalog Item Request - Restrict Deployment Field by entitlement

[mkijowski]

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I would like to restrict the number of deployments a user can have based on entitlement.  I have the same blueprints that get deployed to multiple VLANs based on the Business Group the user is coming from, and I have some users in multiple business groups, each having access to the same blueprint via different entitlements.  Instead of allowing all users to deploy multiple of some deployments I would like to allow a user to request one deployment per entitlement.

Is this possible somewhere in the backend?  Do I need some custom properties to track this?  Is this more work than its worth and I need to just create copies of my blueprints for each entitlement (and then update them all individually when I update the actual machine image)?

[adrianPekar]

mkijowskiHi mkijowski,

I did not really get what you want to achieve. Do you want to limit the number of deployments for those users who are in more than 1 BG? What do you mean by "to allow a user to request one deployment per entitlement"?

You can restrict the number of deployments in the Catalog Item setup page (via Quota). If a user already requested a catalog item, every other request for that specific catalog item will be declined (see the attached screenshot).

You can grant privileges to request a deployment/blueprint, turn on/off, restart, etc. in the Entitlements setup page.

If you want to have more control over you requests, I would try to build an Approval Policy which you can set when setting up entitlements. E.g. I would like to manually approve those requests where the users are asking for VMs with more than 4 CPU/8GB RAM. There you have several options, like request number, but you have to test it since I am not sure how will it behave.

[mkijowski]

Thanks for the quick reply adrianPekar!  Sorry if my post was not quite descriptive enough.

I am trying to condense the number of blueprints that I have.  Since multiple Business Groups occasionally need similar or identical services.  Typically we only allow one of a specific blueprint per user, and those services are deployed on the reservation available to that BG.  Since the same blueprint is used across multiple BGs (and the reservations are different for each BG) this is working nearly exactly how I would want.  I only need to update 1 VM, then update 1 blueprint for all BGs.

The problem I am now facing is a few users are starting to work in multiple BGs.  If I limit the deployment quota to one, those users cannot request a deployment on another entitlement/reservation (which is on another VLAN, with access to different resources), and if I bump the quota to two, users who only belong to one BG could request multiple of the same deployment wasting resources.  In addition, I have one BG that needs a quota of 1, and another BG needs a quota of 2 of the same blueprint.

I could just create separate blueprints/deployments for each business group, but then I am maintaining N copies of the same blueprint based on the same VM/snapshot when all that I want different from one BG to the next is the quota ( since the reservation takes care of making sure the blueprint deploys to the correct VLAN and other resource differences).

I'm guessing there is just no way to have entitlement based quotas instead of blueprint based quotas?  Or does it sound like I'm doing something way out there with vRA?