vRealize Automation 7.2 – Reservations, Reservation Policies and Network Profiles

First, let’s create a Reservation Policy. This is essentially something you can use to link a Blueprint to a particular Reservation (think Gold / Silver etc.)

You can create two Reservation Policies – or rather two types

• Reservation Policy
  • Link Resources of a Blueprint to a Reservation
• Storage Reservation Policy
  • Same but for storage only

I only got one datastore, but I create one anyway for demonstration purposes. Click New

Here you can see I created two policies, one for Compute, the other for Storage

Next I need some Network Profiles

Click New

I don’t want to ‘re-explain’ my environment – have a look HERE. But essentially I have NSX in my environment and as a result the following networks I need to configure

• 172.1.0.0/24 (External)
  • Client Network #1
• 172.2.0.0/24 (External)
  • Client Network #2
• 172.5.0.0/29 (External)
  • Transit Network
• 192.99.0.0/24 – routed networks cut into /30 chunks

First Network Profile is of the 172.1.0.0/24 range

Some DNS stuff

Here I only need 50 IPs – if that

When you hit Apply you can see the list will be populated

Now I repeated the process with my second range – 172.2.0.0/24

Next the Transit Range – this does not require a range

That is all I need, as the Routed network will have the required ranges:

DNS

Now the Routed range. Here I create a /24 which is split up into /30 subnets

Also important – select the Transit network just created – again – this is really only needed if you use NSX and want to provide on demand routed networks.

And once more – DNS – the IP was autocompleted from the Transit network

When you click Autogenerate Ranges you can see that it now splits up the /24 into /30 subnets. Each Blueprint essentially gets one of those ranges so you need to make sure they are appropriately sized

Now we got all the bits ready to create the Reservation. First ensure that all Endpoints are working and the inventory is up to date.

Click Data Collection on your Compute Resource relevant to your vCenter Endpoint

Make sure the Inventory 

and Network and Security Inventory are up to date (IF applicable)

Now add the reservation

Click New > vSphere (vCenter)

Give it a name, select the Tenant, Business Group and Reservation Policy we just created.

 

Select the Compute Resource relevant to your vCenter Enpoint, set the maximum memory and storage reservation and, if you wish to do so, select a default Resource Pool for vRA deployed machines. Here I got a Resource Pool with low shares.

Now attach the newly created Network Profiles to the port groups, or as in my example, NSX Logical Switches (which in essence are port groups from the vCenter standpoint of view)

Again, this is only relevant if you use NSX and expect to use On-Demand Routed Networks in Blueprints

Select your Transport Zone, Security Groups (here I don’t select a default one) and DLR (or LDR as I named it here ‘wrongly’)

Done 🙂

Next we create our first Blueprint and setup Entitlements