vRealize Automation-Create Business Group and Reservation

What is a Business Group?

A Business group associates a set of services and resources to a set of users, such as a line of business, department, or other organizational unit. A business group is created within a tenant by the tenant administrator.

A business group can have access to catalog items specific to that group and to catalog items that are shared between business groups in the same tenant. Each business group has one or more reservations that determine on which compute resources, virtual machines that this group has requested can be provisioned. To request catalog items, a user must belong to at least one business group. A user can be a member of more than one business group, and can have different roles in different groups.

A business group must have at least one business group manager, who monitors the resource use for the group and often is an approver for catalog requests. The group managers also create and manage machine blueprints for the groups they manage.

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

7: Creating and Configuring Fabric Groups

Now lets see how to create a Business Group.

To create a Business Group login to vRA console using Tenant administrator credentials.

Navigate to Infrastructure -> Groups -> Business Groups. Click on New Business Group button

Specify the name of the Business Group and a valid description. I am using IT-Support name in my lab for my Business Group.

Select the default machine prefix. We have created a machine prefix vRA-Cloud in our last post Creating and Configuring Fabric Group

For AD Container you can select a specific OU from your AD. I have an OU called IT_Admins created which I have used here.

Select an AD user as Group Manager Role for this Business Group. I have a user named Sam which I selected as Group Manager.

Specify an email for Send Notification emails. This will be used for approval process and workflow related tasks.

Select an AD user as Support role and User role. I have selected alexhunt@alex.local and manish@alex.local for these 2 roles respectively. Hit OK once you have filled all the fields.

Your newly created business group will be visible under Business Groups.

Create Reservation for Business Group

Next we have to define resources that will be consumed by this Business group. Resources are defined by creating reservations. We have added vSphere as endpoint, but the reservation specified in vRA has no relation to reservations created at vSphere level.

Reservation can be created and associated to Business Group by Fabric Administrators. Login to vRA console using the fabric admin credential.

Navigate to Infrastructure -> Reservations -> Reservation. Click on New Reservation -> Virtual -> vSphere(vCenter)

In Reservation Information tab:

Select a Compute Resources from the dropdown.

Name field will be auto populated with name of the reservation. By default this name is your cluster name with Res-1 appended at the end. I have changed this name for simplicity.

Select the default tenant , vsphere.local in our case as we did not created any additional tenant.

Select the Business Group for which you are creating reservation. I have only created one Business Group “IT-Support” in my lab.

Select the Reservation Policy. In our last post we have created a reservation policy by the name Cloud-Prod-Res which I selected here.

Machine Quota: Determines maximum number of powered-on machines for this reservation.

Click on Resources tab and specify the amount of RAM for this Business Group by filling the This Reservation field.

Under Storage, select the datastore on which virtual machines will be provisioned for this business group and supply a value in This Reservation Reserved field.

Select the Network tab and map the vSphere portgroup to the network profile created in vRA. In our last post we have created External Network profile. I have mapped it to the Lab-Mgmt portgroup.

Go to Alerts tab. Here you can define the threshold for Storage, Memory, CPU and Machine quota. By default all this field is selected at 80% and Capacity Alerts is set to off. Select “On” and drag the slider to set your custom thresholds for different piece.

Whenever capacity threshold is crossed in this Business Group, The group manager will be notified via email as “send alerts to group manager” is selected.

Optionally you can provide an email address in Recipients field if you want to notify other user in this Business Group apart from Group Manager. I have chosen to notify the fabric admin whenever any alert is generated for this business group.

Once you are done with configuration hit OK button.