vRA 7 Cloning and templates

[rockrom]

We are in the process of evaluating products to replace vCloud Director as we are not a service provider.  I have vRA 7 up and running and everything is working well.  The only thing holding us back is the inability of our self-service users to clone VM's and make templates within vRA 7.  We have over 3000 VM's in our vCD environment and most of our users need the ability to clone their own VM's and make their own templates to be used in making their own blueprints.  In vCD they make catalog items from their VM's (or clones of them) so actual VM templates aren't needed.  In vRA they can't do this.  This was one of the big selling points to the business when we implanted Lab Manager and then vCD all those years ago.  If we move to vRA, they will need IT (my team) to clone/make templates in vCenter for them.  This will be a deal breaker for most as they heavily rely on this ability.  Why would these basic features be missing from vRA?  Or am I missing something?  We can't be the only ones disturbed by this "downgrade" of features.  Otherwise vRA 7 seems to deliver everything we need.

[HariRajan]

This can be done through VRA , Below are your requirements, please correct me if I am wrong.

1. Users need the option to create VM  and Template  -> give restricted VC access to one resource pool. or present VRO workflow for each phase of actions.                        

2. Users need to publish blue print in VRA -> Business group manager can create blue prints or else create a VRO workflow present it in XaaS.

[pizzle85]

Does the end result need to be a template? We just give all our uses the ability to clone any VM that they own in vRA. We have a couple base VM everyone can clone from if they want to get started and create some custom images. I also wrote an action that lets them convert the VM to a template but no one uses it, they all just clone off VMs.

[rockrom]

Thanks for the response.  I'm new to this, but I don't see a way to clone a VM in vRA.   Right now they clone their own VM's in vCD and add them to the catalog to use as a base image and to share with others.  vCD doesn't use templates.  vRA only allows blueprints for this purpose.  The only reason I mentioned VM templates is that they are required for blueprints.  The users can create blueprints but I would have to created the templates for them first in vCenter.  They can't make blueprints right from their VM's.  They either need to be able to make their own templates from their VM's so they can then make blueprints from them or they need to clone their own vRA VM's and then be able to add them add as catalogue.  We're trying to give them the same abilities that they have in vCD.

[rockrom]

Thank you.  Not sure what you mean by " give restricted VC access to one resource pool".  Give what/who VC access?  We don't want to give users access to vCenter.  We're not using vRO and would like to avoid it if we can.

And yes they can create blueprints but they have no way of creating the templates they need for the blueprints.

[pizzle85]

You're probably going to have to use vRO if you go with vRA.

[pizzle85]

I haven't worked with vCD so i'm not sure what its capabilities are.

In my opinion one of the major shortcomings of vRA is the lack of form customization in IaaS blueprints. For us we have about 260 business groups where each group has their own templates they clone from. In order to allow each group the ability to only clone their own templates and not other groups' we need to do custom forms which you cant do in the IaaS blueprints.

By default vRA lets you choose one Template per IaaS blueprint. To expand on this you can create a vRO workflow that you use as an XaaS blueprint that in turn requests an IaaS blueprint. In the vRA XaaS form you would do your VM or template restriction as an action and validate in the workflow itself (to prevent API workarounds). You would pass the "CloneFrom" property to the IaaS blueprint which is the string name of the VM or template you want to clone from.

Its a real PITA but works...

I haven't had a lot of time to dive into the new features of vRA 7 but from what i've seen we're still stuck with the same form restrictions which makes this sort of thing pretty complicated.

[rockrom]

I'm coming realize that it is a PITA.  I was just hoping I was missing something.  Thanks.

[pizzle85]

What you could do if your letting your business groups create their own blueprints (we don't) is to just use the existing vRO workflow "Clone Machine" as a resource action. This would let users clone any VM they have provisioned in vRA. You could then create another vRO workflow and use it as a resource action, that just takes the VC:VirtualMachine as an input and simply runs something like:

vm.markAsTemplate();

Which will convert the machine to a template. After the next IaaS inventory scan (which is 1 day by default) that template will show up in the list of templates they can select from when creating or modifying a blueprint.

[HariRajan]

precisely regarding the VC  access , i just meant to give restricted access to support role / business group manager from the  BU for only particular resource pool  in VC, this is just a work around but works well without any security breach ,

more precisely , VRO workflow , works very well for your requirement ,

also cloudutil is the command line utility available for interacting to the cloud from command line , you need to write a script using vsphere powercli and cloudutil . This all works well .