vRealize Automation-Creating and Configuring Fabric Groups

Fabric and Fabric Groups

The Fabric groups are what enable you to provide access to resources from your physical infrastructure. Fabric includes all the computing resources that are discovered from the added endpoint data collection.

Fabric is organized into fabric groups and there can be multiple fabric groups with different purposes, for example you may assign clusters to different business groups within the enterprise to ensure performance.

Within a fabric group we add users or groups that are responsible for managing infrastructure resources and add the resources they are responsible for.

For example we may select clusters that are managed from vCenter and assign the user/groups that are responsible for managing those resources.

Fabric administrators are responsible for creating reservations on the compute resources within their groups to allocate fabric to specific business groups. Fabric groups are created in a specific tenant, but their resources can be made available to users who belong to business groups in all tenants.

If you have missed earlier posts of this series then I would recommend reading them first before going ahead. You can access the earlier posts from below links:

1: Introduction to vCAC(vRA)

2: Installing and Configuring vRA Identity Appliance

3: Installing and Configuring vRA Appliance

4: Installing and configuring IaaS Components

5: Creating Tenants

6: Adding vSphere Endpoints

In this post lets see how to create Fabric Groups.

Creating Fabric Groups

Login to vRA portal using Infrastructure administrator credentials. Navigate to Infrastructure -> Group -> Fabric Groups -> New Fabric Groups

1. Provide the name and description for the fabric group

2. Assign the group or user account for Fabric administrator role. I have a user fab-admin created in my AD and assigned this user to fabric administrator role.

3. All the Clusters which are under added vSphere endpoint will appear under Compute resources. You can select the cluster which can be part of this fabric group. In my infrastructure I have only one cluster in my vCenter server. Click on OK.

The newly created fabric group will be visible under Fabric Groups

Creating Machine Prefix

Machine prefixes are used to generate names of provisioned machines and are shared across all tenants. Fabric Administrators have rights to create Machine prefixes.

The prefix consists of a base name followed by a counter. The counter can start at a number other than 1 and be of a specified length.If a machine prefix is vRA-Cloud, the number of digits is 3, and the next number is 1, the machines that will be provisioned will have names: vRA-Cloud001, vRA-Cloud002, and so on.

To create Machine Prefix logout as Infrastructure Administrator and login as Fabric Admin

Navigate to Infrastructure -> Blueprints -> Machine Prefixes -> New Machine Prefix

Enter Machine Prefix, Number of Digits and Next number. The prefix consists of a base name followed by a counter. The counter can start at a number other than 1 and be of a specified length.

If a machine prefix is vRA-Cloud, the number of digits is 3, and the next number is 1, the machines will be provisioned with names: vRA-Cloud001, vRA-Cloud002, and so on. Click on Green Check Mark.

Create Reservation

A reservation policy is a set of reservations that can be selected in a machine blueprints to restrict provisioning to those reservations only.

When a user requests a machine, it can be provisioned on any reservation of the appropriate type that has sufficient capacity for the machine. You can apply a reservation policy to a blueprint to restrict the machines provisioned from a that blueprint to a subset of available reservations.

Reservation policies provide an optional and helpful means of controlling how reservation requests are processed. A reservation policy is often used to collect resources into groups for different service levels, or to make a specific type of resource easily available for a particular purpose.

A storage reservation policy is a set of virtual datastores that can be selected on a machine blueprint to restrict disk provisioning to only those datastores. A new machine might be provisioned on any reservation that has sufficient capacity. Applying a reservation policy to a blueprint restricts the machine provisioned from that blueprint to a subset of available reservations.

Navigate to Infrastructure -> Reservations -> Reservation Policies -> New Reservation Policy & New Storage Reservation Policy.

Enter the Name for Reservation policies and click on Green Check Mark to save.

Create Network Profiles

Network profiles are assigned to reservation policy. This network profiles can be used to assign IP address to the provisioned virtual machines. We can create following 4 types of Network Profiles in vRA:

External
NAT
Private
Routed

In my lab I am going to create an external network.

Go to Infrastructure -> Reservation -> Network Profiles. Click on New Network Profile and Select External Network from dropdown menu.

Under Network Profile information tab ,Provide name for the external network, a valid description, Subnet mask, Gateway and DNS information.

Select IP Ranges tab and click on New Network Range to define an IP range for the External Network.

Provide the name for the IP Range with a valid description and select the Starting IP Address and Ending IP Address for this new range. Hit OK.

IP Addresses section will be populated with list of IP that are in External Network along with VM to which these IP are assigned and status. As of now we don’t have any VM connected to the External Network which we created so everything is showing as unallocated.