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Craig_G2
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Hot Shot

vCAC Case studies

Has anyone deployed vCAC 6.0.x in production? If so I'm interested to hear how you are getting on, what your main use cases are and what challenges you have had?

Looking forward to your responses,

🙂

thanks

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5 Replies
awjudge
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Yep, we've deployed into production. So far, so good, although there was a relatively steep learning curve to get everything working the way we wanted.

To address your queries:

Use Cases:

1. We wanted to orchestrate the deployment of VMs by our IT department. So not self-service as such, just streamlining our processes. New server builds now take 5-10 minutes and orchestrate everything we used to have to do manually. That includes: IP/DNS records, storage allocation, server spec config (CPU, RAM) approvals processes and Change control.

2. Self-service for end users - We give our users access for Dev/Test and 'Experimental' environments. Using what we learned in step 1 above, we've orchestrated all of these use cases and have presented this to the end users.

3. External Cloud - AWS. We are looking to move some of our infrastructure to AWS, we're still in the process of getting this up and running, but we're using the vCAC AWS connector, and also the vCO AWS plugin.

We should end up with a single catalog of blueprints, independent of infrastructure, while having visibility of who they belong to, and how much they cost.

Things we learned along the way...

1. Get your head around vCO, and specifically the vCAC plugin for vCO. It's your best friend when looking to customise how vCAC works.

2. Read about vCAC workflow states, and how Workflow Stubs can extend them, this is really useful!

3. Don't be afraid to use vCAC Custom Properties and the Property Dictionary. They are a really good way of triggering specific vCO workflows based on the properties of the provisioned VMs.

4. The install is still really picky. Make a small mistake and your deployment won't work, out of the box. There are some great blog posts which walk you through the installation. This one is particularly good. How To Install vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) 6.0 - Part 1 - Identity Appliance | Tech Blog | Blog

5. It's useful to understand the structure of vCAC. Grant Orchard's blog has a great primer on this, we found it very very useful.http://grantorchard.com/vcac/concepts/navigating-the-vcac-6-0-logical-model/

I could go on, but that's just a few things I can think of. Will post more as it comes to mind. Hope this helps.

Alex

Craig_G2
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Appreciate your response.. We have almost the same use case.

vCO has been extremely helpful in achieving some of our goals!

Cheers

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frostyk
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Great post.  I'm in a position where I just left a job where I setup VCAC (and worked through many of the finicky problems of install).  I'm currently waiting to move onto a new job that will be integrating cCAC and vCO.  I've never touched vCO before.  Any good readings you could suggest on the topic of vCO and integrating it with vCAC?  I've got nothing to do but read for a while, but I'm finding good material on the subject hard to find.

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Craig_G2
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Honestly, the vCO & vCAC documentation then these blogs have hekped me:

http://grantorchard.com/

http://elasticskies.com/

[virtualjad.com]

http://www.vcoteam.info/

http://vcacteam.info/

ALso read about the vCO SOAP,REST, POWERSHELL and SSH plugins.

They are your friend for integration

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GrantOrchardVMw
Commander
Commander

Thanks for the shout out eatVM!

Grant

Grant http://grantorchard.com
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