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+ (THIS BLOG POST)
- Frequently asked scenarios about Cloud Consumption Interface (CCI) for vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+
- Frequently asked scenarios about Global Inventory for vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+
- Frequently asked scenarios about Subscription & Entitlement for vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+
VM Provisioning & Management
With all of your available vCenter Server(s) now visible within the VMC Console, VM provisioning could not be easier. While the current provisioning workflow is still pretty basic, it does allow users to select from one of the vCenter Server(s) and quickly deploy either a new VM from scratch by configuring the virtual hardware and guest operating system or you can deploy from an existing vSphere Template that already exists in a particular vCenter Server. You will need to setup Enterprise Federation within the VMC Console and ensure that the set of user(s) authorized to use vSphere+ service also have VM provisioning permission within a given vCenter Server.
From the VMC Console, you will have some basic VM operations such as Power On, Power Off, Reset, Suspend or open up the VM Console which will open the VM Console directly on the vCenter Server using the vSphere UI. There are so many possibilities with being able to easily provision VMs across your vCenter Server, I know we have only scratched the surface and I hope to see this evolve over time providing more functionality and also APIs, so that these operations can be fully automated using your favorite VMware Automation tool of choice.
Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
Currently, there is only a single VMC Console role to access the vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+ service called Cloud Administrator which provides full access to the service including VM provisioning. With that said, unlike the other functionality such as vCenter Lifecycle Management or vCenter Configuration Profiles, additional pre-requisites must be met before user(s) or group(s) are allowed to provision a VM.
- Enterprise Federation is required both in the VMC Console (as mentioned earlier)
- Identity Federation with the same identity source must also be configured on your vCenter Server
- User(s) / Group(s) must be given Cloud Administrator role in VMC Console
- User(s) / Group(s) must have VM Provisioning privileges defined within your vCenter Server
If any of the above requirements have not been met, then a user will not be allowed to provision a VM in your vCenter Server.
For power users, you will likely continue to use existing vSphere UI and vSphere API that is provided by the respective vCenter Server as your primary consumption interface, especially if you have existing automation tools that you are currently using for VM provisioning and management. Resource utilization is also missing during the VM provisioning workflow, so that may be something to consider when providing users access to provision VMs using the VMC Console.
For those interested in the 15day free vSphere+ trial, the VM provisioning capability is available during the trial period.
Here are some additional resources related to VM provisioning that might be of interests:
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