Configure business groups for a given design
To understand the requirement of a business group you need to understand a little about the vRA fabric. In vRA, infrastructure resources you can perform actions on are called Endpoints (see Objective 3.4) for instance a vCenter is an endpoint because we can provision VMs to it etc. (other endpoints could be AWS, Hyper-V or things like NSX as we can create vxlan portgroups or vRO as we can start workflows)
If you have Multiple vCenter endpoints you may want to group these together in a Fabric Group because the same administrator is likely responsible for all vCenters, a fabric administrator can then be assigned to this fabric group. As you may have a different administrator (or maybe developers) who are responsible for vRO, you may want to group these vRO endpoints in a different Fabric Group so you can assign a different fabric administrator
Once a fabric group is created that contains endpoints (defined as compute resources) a fabric administrator will grant access to these compute resources\endpoints by defining a reservation. The reservation will be specific to a business group and define the relationship between the business group and the compute resource\endpoint within the fabric group. This allows business groups to consume the compute resource\endpoint and allows the Fabric administrator to put a restriction on the amount of endpoint resource that can be consumed by that business group
Catalogue items are also scooped to a business group through entitlements.
The “My Goals” Wizard lists tasks which are useful to complete before creating a business group. These can be found under My Goals>Tenant Configuration
We have already created a Directory service that allows us to assign directory users to a business group (in the case of my lab Active Directory LDAP) in Objective 2.2
We will detail the creation of Custom Groups in Objective 2.4
We will also configure Users & Groups in Objective 2.4
Configuring Branding is not specifically called out in any Objective, and isn’t a requirement for a business group, I will come back and visit this in Objective 2.1 managing tenants.
Adding and configuring a notification provider (specifying an email server) is also not covered in any objective within the exam blueprint but is covered below as business group managers will receive emails from the business group
Adding Notification Providers is done by the Tenant Admin role
To Configure Notification providers click on the link in My Goals>Tenant Configuration>Configure Notification Providers or browse to Administration > Notifications > Email Servers
You will need to set an in going and outgoing email server, my vRA appliance has access to the internet and since I dont have an exchange server i’m using my ISP settings to configure the provider!
Business Groups are created by the Tenant administrator under Administration > Users and Groups > Business Groups.
Custom Properties are covered in Objective 1.1 and can be assigned to a business group.
There’s a good blog here on Active Directory Policies, no need to re-write the wheel!
Add users and groups to appropriate support roles for a given design
A business group must have at least one business group manager, who monitors the resource use for the group and can be the approver for catalog requests.
Lets assume a development team has their own business group, a developer, who will be a business group user, has an entitlement to a catalogue item that allows them to provision a virtual machine to any of the endpoints that the business group (development team) has a reservation too.
The business group manager, who is likely to be the development team manager or team leader, can be set as an approver of that catalog item request and the virtual machine wont be provisioned until the development team manager has approved the developers request.
It’s good to have this ability to approve requests as only the business group manager has access to monitor resource usage within their business group.
The business group manager will also create and manage entitlements to catalogue items for their business group.
The details of all vRA roles are found on my Objective 2.1 blog
Determine and select the appropriate machine prefix for the business group
Creating machine prefixes is described in Section 5 objective 5.2
Once a machine prefix has been created, you can set the default Business group machine prefix on the infrastructure tab of the Business group. When a virtual machine is provisioned by a user within the business group the default pre-fix will be used to form the VM name based on these settings. This does not stop a different pre-fix from being assigned within a catalogue blueprint & the default business group machine pre-fix can also be changed at any time.
If the pre-fix is changed, it will only affect new Virtual Machines being provisioned and will not change the name of virtual machines that have already been provisioned!
The active directory container option is for WIM provisioning only, if you don’t intend to use WIM Provisioning to build Windows Servers then stick with the Active Directory Policies on the general tab to define the destination OU of provisioned VMs, however for the exam it’s good to know the difference between the two options.
The AD Container option expects an active directory DN name in the form of
ou=windows,dc=danlab,dc=local
Tools
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