Wednesday 25 November 2015

Adding Physical HP Endpoints in vCAC a.k.a vRA 6.x Creating Blueprint - Part 3

Physical blueprints are a bit different than Virtual Blueprints because you can’t give users the ability to define the exact makeup of the machine they want. They can’t decide they want to add additional storage to a physical machine like they can a virtual. They also can’t select which network they want the machine placed on (without customization) like a virtual machine.

What they can do however is tell you how many CPU’s and how much RAM they would like in the physical machine they are requesting. I know what do you mean they can tell me what they want? vCAC can’t magically add CPU’s or memory, but what it can do is look for a match, or the closest match to what they user needs. You have the ability to set a maximum and minimum number of CPU’s and amount of RAM a user can request from the blueprint. You can also determine how you want to allocate for each of them. You can have vCAC look for an exact match to the request, or look for an “At Least” match to find a server that meets the needs of the request.

* This tutorial is meant to show you the basics of creating a Physical HP server blueprint. I will be publishing a number of more complete physical provisioning tutorials and this article will be utilized as a reference.

Creating a Physical HP Blueprint

Go to infrastructure -> Blueprints -> Blueprints and select New Blueprint -> Physical -> HP iLO.

On the blueprint information tab give the blueprint a name and select the Machine Prefix to utilize. One thing you won’t see here that existed in previous releases of vCAC is the ability to select a Business Group. This is now handled through the catalog entitlements.

Next on the Build Information tab the type should be Server and the workflow should be PhysicalProvisioningWorkflow. Here is wher eyou can set the min and max for CPU, memory, & lease. It’s also where you determine how to find a match for the resource.

I’m going to skip over the properties tab for now and we will go to the actions tab. Here you can select what actions can be performed against this blueprint. Click ok to create the Blueprint. I will cover information regarding the properties for physical provisioning when I cover the type of physical provisioning based on operating system in another post.