vRA 8 / Cloud Assembly – Sample/Simple Pattern

As you know from the previous post, my first book will be published soon. However, not everything could be in one book, so I will also add articles that you can read here.

At first glance, something goes into which vRA was created. Automatic machine provisioning with a specific application.

My environment is as follows:
vCenter with two templates Windows and Linux
two customization files for Windows and Linux

One vRA 8 with vCenter Endpoint and one Project.

At the beginning I created a blueprint which contains one vsphere machine and one network also with vsphere. Blueprint looks in that way

As you already know perfectly in Cloud Assembly, we have Infrastructure as a code which manifests itself in the possibility of creating blueprints using YAML code

So the code looks like this

formatVersion: 1
inputs: {}
resources:
  Cloud_vSphere_Machine_1:
    type: Cloud.vSphere.Machine
    properties:
      image: ''
      cpuCount: 1
      totalMemoryMB: 1024
      networks:
        - network: '${resource.Cloud_vSphere_Network_1.id}'
  Cloud_vSphere_Network_1:
    type: Cloud.vSphere.Network
    properties:
      networkType: existing

As this is a standard and simple blueprint can stop here but I think that what we will have at the end will be better.

So basically I wanna customize this as much as I can, that I’ve change CPU and memory as an Input properties and now we can setup this in request phase.

CPU:
    type: integer
    default: 1
    title: Number of CPU
    description: Number of CPU
  Mem:
    type: integer
    default: 1024
    title: Mem Size
    description: Mem Size

However, the CPU and memory are not everything because we imagine the situation that the client wants to have a choice between Windows and Linux, so we could create two patters and assign an appropriate Image to each of them, but I decided to set the system selection as an option and of course why we need a clean system like we can customize it from vCenter

In my environment I have two images and two customizations so the user can choose himself

image_name:
    type: string
    enum:
      - Win
      - Lin
    default: Win
    title: Image Name
    description: Image Name
  custom_spec:
    type: string
    enum:
      - Win-Stat-192
      - Lin-Stat-192
    default: Win-Stat-192
    title: Customization Name
    description: Customization Name

The next element is the network, we should also give the user a choice, that’s why I used the same maneuver and in the list of choices, it passes values from two network profiles

net_name:
    type: string
    enum:
      - vra
      - lab
    default: vra
    title: Network Name
    description: Network Name

the last element that is in the patter is middleware, in order to show the functionality I chose the web server as true or false

web_server:
    type: boolean
    title: Web Server
    description: Web Server
    default: false

At the very end I transferred all the elements to the Virtual Machine and to the network settings, and full YAML looks like this

formatVersion: 1
inputs:
  image_name:
    type: string
    enum:
      - Win
      - Lin
    default: Win
    title: Image Name
    description: Image Name
  custom_spec:
    type: string
    enum:
      - Win-Stat-192
      - Lin-Stat-192
    default: Win-Stat-192
    title: Customization Name
    description: Customization Name
  CPU:
    type: integer
    default: 1
    title: Number of CPU
    description: Number of CPU
  Mem:
    type: integer
    default: 1024
    title: Mem Size
    description: Mem Size
  net_name:
    type: string
    enum:
      - vra
      - lab
    default: vra
    title: Network Name
    description: Network Name
  web_server:
    type: boolean
    title: Web Server
    description: Web Server
    default: false
resources:
  vSphere_Machine_1:
    type: Cloud.vSphere.Machine
    properties:
      image: '${input.image_name}'
      cpuCount: '${input.CPU}'
      totalMemoryMB: '${input.Mem}'
      networks:
        - network: '${resource.vSphere_Network_1.id}'
      name: '${input.image_name}VM'
      customizationSpec: '${input.custom_spec}'
      web_server: '${input.web_server}'
  vSphere_Network_1:
    type: Cloud.vSphere.Network
    properties:
      networkType: existing
      constraints:
        - tag: '${input.net_name}'

Diagram was not change much but here it is

As our blueprint is completed, we can pass it on to users on the Service Broker portal.

Users can, however, unknowingly choose values that do not match (e.g. Windows and customization for Linux) so I decided to limit the choice of customization only by informing what was chosen by using custom forms and the usual IF parameter.

On the broker portal in the content tab we have the opportunity to create custom forms

Our standard form looks in that way

On Customization Name I’ve marked this field as read only but visible to all

and I’ve setup a Values which depend from what user setup in Image

Now we can request our VM.

however let’s hold on. Who will install our web server? I decided to use here a solution known from earlier versions of vRa, namely workflow in vRO. So I created a subscription to call my pattern after the deposit was completed.

my workflow in vRO may not be extraordinary, but a simple solution thanks to which I achieve what is required, i.e. installed Web Server.

So on Windows we will have IIS and on Linux we will have Apache. If you wanna se my code please left comment here.

And now we can finish the topic of simple workflow and as you can see it is not so scary as it might seem and with a simple configuration we achieve our goal.

To read in the next article I hope that you will still be with me