VCAP-CMA Deploy – Objective 3.1

Disclaimer: These are my notes from studying for the 3V0-31.18 exam. If something doesn’t make sense, please feel free to reach out.

The main goal for the whole of section 3 is to understand how to build governance into your vRA installation.

Objective 3.1 – Manage Multiple Reservations to Meet Business Needs

References

To reiterate again we need to think about what could be involved end to end so in a scenario where multiple reservations are the answer, what else could be involved?

Let’s start with creating a new machine prefix, I like to set each business group up with a default prefix.

Go to Infrastructure, Administration, Machine Prefixes & hit the New button. Fill in the details and remember to click the green tick.

You may also want to consider using an Active Directory Policy. This defines where machine accounts are created when a IaaS machine are deployed. Go to Administration, Active Directory Policies & hit the New button. Fill in the details and hit ok. Once created this can be allocated to a business group.

Then create the business group, Goto Administration, Users & Groups, Business Groups. Fill in the details on each page and hit Finish.

Quick reminder of the business group roles:

<td>
  <strong>Permissions</strong>
</td>
<td>
  <ul>
    <li>
      Add/Delete users to the group
    </li>
    <li>
      Assign user roles for the group
    </li>
    <li>
      Create/manage entitlements for group
    </li>
    <li>
      Request/manage items on behalf of other group users
    </li>
    <li>
      Monitor resource usage for group
    </li>
    <li>
      Change machine owner
    </li>
  </ul>
</td>
<td>
  <ul>
    <li>
      Request/manage items on behalf of other group users
    </li>
    <li>
      Change machine owner
    </li>
  </ul>
</td>
<td>
  <ul>
    <li>
      Use/Run actions on resources provisioned by another user
    </li>
  </ul>
</td>
<td>
  <ul>
    <li>
      Request catalogue items
    </li>
    <li>
      Manage their own resources
    </li>
  </ul>
</td>

Next up we’re creating the reservation policy, this is basically a tag that can be used to link a blueprint & a particular reservation. Often used if a blueprint has specific hardware requirements or if a tiering strategy is implemented. Go to Infrastructure, Reservations, Reservation Policies & hit the New button. Fill in the details and click OK.

Now all the foundations are in, let’s create the reservation itself. Go to Infrastructure, Reservations, Reservations and hit the New button. You’ll get some options as to what type of reservation you want to create, choose the most appropriate, here we’re going for vSphere.

If you already have a reservation created, you’ll get a drop down at the top to copy the settings across so you can just make the necessary changes. Complete the pages as you would normally for creating a reservation.

If you’ve got multiple reservations assigned to the same business group vRA will use the below list to select which to use first.