vCAC plugin : custom values on blueprint

[Aristizabal]

Hello,

I am using the vCO plugin on vCAC 5.2 to provision VMs, the out of the box workflow is called "Provision a virtual machine from a blueprint". It works great but it doesn't matter what values I specify for Memory and CPU the VM is always created with the blueprint default values. If I go to the Self service portal or the admin portal on vCAC and I specify different CPU and memory values the VM is reconfigured properly at the end of the process.

Has anybody encountered this using the vCO plugin?

Thanks,

Juan.

[qc4vmware]

Did you ever figure this out?  I am trying to use the vCACBlueprint.provision() method which is what is called from that workflow but I can't figure out how to pass over the values for the properties or custom properties. 

[Aristizabal]

Unfortunately the parameters for vCACBlueprint.provision() that make reference to the number of vCPUs and memory are only defined for Amazon blueprints. In my case I have vCloud director blueprints so my only option is to modify the VM after it has been provisioned.

I even opened a SR with VMware and I was told that this is a limitation on the current version of the plugin.

[qc4vmware]

Wow... that is extremely lame.  Hopefully they will get this plugin more fully functional soon.  In the mean time I can deal with that in the stub call out for building machine.  I did successfully deploy a couple of vms with the provision() method but for some reason they don't show up anywhere in vCAC.  Is there some step I missed?  Have you seen this happen?  I see the vm's get deployed into vSphere but I got some odd errors in vCAC and I can't manage them from vCAC.

[cdecanini_]

Paul,

You did not miss any step. The plug-in you are using is talking to the IaaS API. To make the VMs appear in the vCAC6 portal there are some extra steps to be completed in the vCAC6 CAFE API.

The vCAC 6 API will become the entry point and a vCAC CAFE plug-in for vCO allow its automation.

[Aristizabal]

I am using vCAC 5.2 and the VMs provisioned through the plugin come as owned by the account used when you added the vCAC server to vCO. In my case a service account, so if I want to see them I have to go to "Enterprise Machines" on the admin website, you can manually change the owner or maybe modify your workflow so the owner of the VM is changed to the user running the workflow.

[qc4vmware]

When can we expect to see this additional plugin for the vCAC/CAFE piece?  At the risk of sounding uneducated what does CAFE stand for?

[qc4vmware]

I have another post on here where I talk in more detail about how I kicked off the workflow.  The values for owner and identityUser are both set to valid users in vCAC that are not the user the plugin is configured for.  I expected for these same users to be the owner.  I'll go back and double check.  I had also assumed if I was logged in as the tenant admin and selected from the drop down to view all machines I managed I would be able to see these machines but they don't show up in my list.  I'm not sure how to properly dispose of them at this point either.

[qc4vmware]

OK... so I went to the compute resource and viewed machines and I see the systems.  Thanks for that advice.  The owner is listed as my account but I still don't see it under my items in vCAC.  Can anyone tell me how I make that magic happen?

[cdecanini_]

I cannot comment on release dates but VMware is certainly commited to release as soon as we have a new release of the product. If I recall well CAFE stands for Cloud Automation Framework for Extensibility. In fact it is the API that allow the vCAC6 UI to interface with its back-end.

[Aristizabal]

Do you see the owner on the admin website as the domain fqdn? in my case I have a long domain so I had to go to the machine and edit the owner from the list of available accounts, only after that it showed up on the portal. This is an overkill for multiple VMs so your best bet might be to incorporate the change owner routine into the workflow code.

[qc4vmware]

I don't see any way of editing the owner only the reservation.  The owner that is listed is the correct owner.  When I use the workflow to deploy the blueprint I am seeing the following error pop up in the logs "Resource not found for the segment 'VirtualMachines' " .  That appears 4 times.  Then an informational message "Submit Virtual Machine Requests Workflow : 1 machines have been provisioned" then one last error "Resource not found for the segment 'WorkflowOperations'." .  If I login as the user that shows up as the owner if I view the machine from the compute resource it does not show up in my list of machines I can only see it from the compute resource.  I have options to destroy, view, or change the reservation but no way to modify the machine that is obvious.  It already shows up as the correct owner anyway.  This is version 6.0.1 so I am not sure how different the IaaS piece is between the two versions since 5.2 was just what is now the IaaS plugin.  Attached is a screen shot of the menu I get for the vm's in the compute resource view.

[Aristizabal]

I think is different, because on 5.2 you just go to "Enterprise Machines" , click in the black arrow in front of the vApp name and select edit; then you can edit the owner.