Bulk Provisioning

[Gr33nEye]

Hi all,

I am hoping someone can point me in the write direction for a use-case/good idea and or if it's even possible (a how to would be great) when it comes to vRA 7.x. The question  I have is focused around bulk VM creation, and is it possible vs the amount of effort required/good idea.

I've been tasked with creating a POC with vRA for a client, that is single org/it dept, based on vSphere(5.X-6.5)  Now the idea is that they would like to automate/simplify the VM building process(just the VM). App deployment is a plus but they have SCCM for that and not in scope.

The problem is that I, and most of they guys here have little to no knowledge on vCAC/vRA. Whilst we can create some simple blueprints with custom properties/drop-downs/subscriptions the knowledge runs out about there.

So far it appears that going down the path of bulk vm creation with vRA is somewhat of a waist of time. Just considering the alternative ie, PS.

Reasons;

1. No easier/equal way to create x number of VMs that all have diff names(departments/apps/env), diff spec, diff cluster destinations,diff networks+ip's, ect.
2. Little documentation, plus what is available has a very steap learning curve.
3. Hand over/future dev would be a nightmare/not going to happen due to 2.

Yes I know we can use a custom workflow with vRO that would except a csv as an input but the client/our sales would like it to be driven fully from vRA catalogs/blueprints. They like the idea of selecting VM's on a webpage and then it just pops up(I kid you not, this was the pitch to the client).

Any help, advice and or your personal experience on this would be appreciated.

Thank you.

[daphnissov]

It really depends on what specifically you mean by "bulk VM creation" since that can go many different ways. What exactly are your requirements when it comes to mass provisioning of VMs? I can infer on what some of those *might* be from your numbered list, but it's not clear. If you can expound upon how these en masse provisions might need to be configured we could provide some better ideas.

[Gr33nEye]

Bulk would mean 10-20 VMs could be more, could be less. So a list of 20VMs need to be built, all have different names(fully diff,both prefix,mid and suffix), hardware specs, networks, OS, note/annotations, ect.  How would you go about provisioning all 20 in one go, because currently the only way i see of doing this would be to generate 20 different catalog requests.

[daphnissov]

Just out of curiosity, what's your use case for this type of ability?

Would these bulk provisions be something that need to be repeatable? I.e., would the same, say, 15 VMs need to be provisioned multiple times going forward? If that's the case, a multi-machine blueprint could be created with different VMs containing different names, networks, etc.

[Gr33nEye]

The use case for this type of automation would be the

• The service desk receives multiple new server requests (ongoing), they roll these request up and do all the build task lets say on Monday and Wednesday. Thus the need to do a X number of totally unique VMs
• Project requirement to spin up X number of servers. This task may not/would not  be repeated again but as before could be 10-20+ servers all relatively unique.

So no, it would not be the same 15 VMs that are going to re-provisioned over and over. New VMs, different amounts of them with different specs.

[daphnissov]

Hmm, your use cases are fairly unique and probably wouldn't best lend themselves to what vRA is designed to do. It sounds like sticking to just a combination of vCenter + Customization Spec + Templates might be best. Otherwise, what you want could be accomplished with vRO but would require developing some fairly sophisticated custom workflows. This could be surfaced up through vRA if you wish in the form of XaaS if you wanted to use policy, governance, and approvals that vRA can provide.