This is a multi-part blog series on some of the frequently asked questions and scenarios for the vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+ Cloud Services. What started out as a single blog post that attempted to summarize some of the learnings and notes that I have made while answering various questions from our field and customers for vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+ quickly turned into a 3K+ word blog post and counting! 😅
While I thought it would be easier from a search perspective to have everything in a single blog post, I decided to take the advice from the community and actually break it up into small blogs which would be part of a large multi-part blog series, in no particular order but I recommend reading it in the following logical order as shown below:
- Frequently asked scenarios about vCenter Cloud Gateway (VCGW) for vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+
- Frequently asked scenarios about vCenter Lifecycle Management for vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+
- Frequently asked scenarios about vCenter Desired State Configuration for vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+
- Frequently asked scenarios about VM Provisioning & Management for vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+
- Frequently asked scenarios about Cloud Consumption Interface (CCI) for vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+ (THIS BLOG POST)
- Frequently asked scenarios about Global Inventory for vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+
- Frequently asked scenarios about Subscription & Entitlement for vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+
Cloud Consumption Interface (CCI)
A really nice addition to the vSphere+ service is that it includes a free tier of the Cloud Consumption Interface (CCI) capability, formally known as Project Cascade, which had GA'ed last year. If you have not heard about CCI, check out the deep dive blog post that I did HERE and I also had recorded a video demo which you can watch HERE.
While you can purchase an Aria Automation Add-On subscription which gives you full access to both Aria Automation and CCI, I think it was a nice move from the Aria team to allow vSphere+ users to experience the power of CCI in some capacity with their free tier offering. One thing that is often asked is whether you get the full capabilities of CCI and the answer is yes, but there are some restrictions on the number of resources that can be created when using CCI.
The following table below captures the limits enforced by the Aria Automation Free tier when CCI (developer experience) is activated, which is 5 for most CCI resources, except Namespaces. Once you purchase Aria Automation Subscription, then there are no limits.
CCI-related resources
| Resource | Limit |
|---|---|
| # of Regions | 2 |
| # of Cloud Accounts/Endpoints | 5 |
| # of Supervisor Namespaces | None |
| # of Supervisor Namespaces Classes | 5 |
| # of VM Classes / Flavor | 5 |
| # of Projects | 5 |
Aria Automation can also be used outside of CCI and the following are the limits enforced for the Aria Automation Free tier
Aria Automation-related resources
| Resource | Limit |
|---|---|
| # of Cloud Zones | 5 |
| # of Images Mappings | 5 |
| # of Images Collected | 5 |
# of Policies (definitions) |
5 |
| # of Custom Roles | 5 |
| # of VMware Cloud Templates | 5 |
| # of Catalog Items | 5 |
| # of Custom Day 2 Actions | 5 |
| # of Managed VMs | None |
| # of Code Stream Pipelines | 5 |
| # of vRO Workflows | 5 |
| # of ABX Actions | 5 |
| # of Subscriptions | 5 |
| # of SaltStack Config Minions | 5 |
Here are some additional resources related to CCI that might be of interests:
- CCI Video Series - Introduction of Cloud Consumption Interface Powered by VMware Aria Automation
- CCI Video Series - Step One : Onboard VMware vCenter Server to vSphere+ Subscription
- CCI Video Series - Step Two : Activating the Developer Experience Service
- CCI Video Series - Deploying Opencart Application using Cloud Consumption Interface(CCI)
Thanks for the comment!