Welcome to Part 5: Agent, Endpoint, and Group Configuration
You should have completed Part 1-4:
Part 1: Deploy and Configure the Identity Appliance
Part 2: Deploy and Configure the vCloud Automation Center Appliance
Part 3: Installing IaaS Components
Part 5: Agent, Endpoint, and Group Configuration
Part 6: Create and Publish Blueprints
Part 7 - Setup vCO, Endpoints, and Advanced Services
During the vCAC Complete Install process, we already installed a vSphere agent. We need to create "Agents" or workers that know how to talk to specific endpoints. There are a few different types of agents and each one has similar installation procedures. The links below will take you to official VMware documentation. We are going to go over the Proxy Agent Configuration for vSphere for configuring the IaaS components.
- Proxy Agent for vSphere
- Proxy Agent for Hyper-V
- Proxy Agent for XenServer
- VDI Agent for XenDesktop
- EPI Agent for Citrix
- EPI Agent for Visual Basic Scripting
- WMI Agent for Remote WMI Tasks for Windows Machines
The vSphere agent/endpoint here is a "vCenter" instance. If you have more than 1 vCenter, then you need to install an additional vSphere Agent on the IaaS Components VM. There is a 1:1 mapping. To install an additional vSphere Agent, scroll to the bottom of this blog post. During the deployment in Step 3 we either kept the name "vCenter" or changed it to the actual name of vCenter during this screen. This name will be used again here.
Store User Credentials for Endpoints
1. Login to your vcac-appliance as an Infratructure Administrator and navigate to Infrastructure -> Endpoints -> Credentials
2. Click on New Credentials located in the right hand side
3. Give this an indentifying name and description. For the username, it's going to depend on what type of endpoint you are connecting to. Since this is vSphere and it uses AD authentication, we need the entire domain credentials. Click the green check mark to save.
Configure the Endpoint
1. Now click on "Endpoints"
2. On the far right hand side, hit the drop down for New Endpoint -> Virtual -> vSphere. If you do NOT see the New Endpoint creation button, make sure you have licensed vCAC by going to the Infrastructure tab -> Administration -> Licensing and enter in your license key.
3. Configure the endpoint
a. Type the name that was done during the agent install process. If you kept the default then it needs to be "vCenter"
b. enter a description
c. Type the name of the vCenter sdk instance such as "https://myvcenter.mycompany.com/sdk"
d. Select the credentials to use to connect to the vCenter instance
e. if you have NSX or vCloud Networking and Security (vShield) you can choose to configure it by clicking on "Specify manager for network and security platform". Just add the address of the server such as "https://myvcns" and the credentals used to connect
f. Click OK and you are done
Create a Fabric Group
This allows you to organize resources and cloud endpoints into fabric groups by type and intent.
1. Navigate to Infrastructure -> Group -> Fabric Groups. Click on New Fabric Group on the right hand side.
a. Give it a name
b. give it a description
c. choose only USERS that can be administrators of this fabric group
d. select compute resources that can be administered.
e. click ok
Configure Machine Pre-fixes
1. If you gave permission to the same user as the one you are logged in as, you need to log out and log back in
2. After logging back in, Go to Infrastructure -> Blueprints -> Machine Prefixes and click on Add a New Machine Prefix on the right hand side. Machine prefixes are used to create names for machines provisioned through vCloud Automation Center. Tenant administrators and business group managers select these machine prefixes and assign them to provisioned machines through blueprints and business group defaults
3. Configure the machine prefix
a. Enter a prefix name. This name needs to be short because you don't want to have a problem with name spaces
b. enter the amount of ending number. in my case since i chose three, i will have a maximum of 999 VMs with this prefix name before vCAC starts back over at 000.
c. enter the number where we will begin. here i'm choosing to start at 001.
d. click the green check mark to save
Create a Business Group
1. Navigate to Infrastructure -> Groups -> Business Group. Click on Add a New Business Group.
2. Configure the Business Group
a. Give it a name such as "sales" or "engineering". I chose "IT"
b. choose a default pre-fix to use for provisioning. This is where something like "it-", "sales-", or "eng-" would be used for prefix names
c. add users into the roles. I just added myself into the group management role. all these users can be populated at a later date.
d. you must type a password for use with emails. this will be used for approval process and workflow related tasks. If you didn't setup SMTP before, you should have under Configuring Notifications
e. Click OK.
Create a Reservation for the Business Group
1. Navigate to Infrastructure -> Reservations -> Reservation and click on New Reservation -> Virtual -> vSphere. Each reservation is configured for a specific business group to grant them access to request machines on a specified compute resource
2. Configure the Reservaton
a. Select a compute resource
b. the names and groups will populate automatically this first time, but you can change them if you have multiple. I changed the name of mine to append "for IT"
c. we have configured and reservation policy's or machine quotas that will limit the amount of resources or number of machine that can be configured.
d. set a priority. The higher the priority, the faster this group will get access to spin up their virtual machines
e. click on the resources tab
f. specify amount of RAM to reserve for this group
g. specify the datastores to use, and how much to reserve. the priority setting will be used for path selection policy's
h. click on the network tab
i. select any networks you want available to users when they provision. you can select multiple networks
j. click ok.
Setup an additional vSphere Agent (for more than 1 vCenter instance)
1. Right click on setup_vcac-va-hostname.domain.name@5480.exe and "Run as Administrator". We have the same installer screen as before
2. Accept the EULA and click next
3. Log into your appliance with the root credentials
4. Now we want to choose Custom Install. Click on Proxy Agents. Click Next
5. Enter the username and password you plan on using as your service account to run this service.
6. Configure the agent details
a. Select vSphere from the Agent Type Drop Down
b. Type in an agent name. All agent names must be unique and there cannot be two alike.
c. Type the FQDN of the server with the Manager Service (this was a complete install done on the iaas box)
d. Type the FQDN of the server with the Manager Web Service (this was a complete install done on the iaas box)
e. Type in the complete Endpoint address as well as port.
7. Click Finish.
Move on to Part 6: Create and Publish Blueprints
Part 1: Deploy and Configure the Identity Appliance
Part 2: Deploy and Configure the vCloud Automation Center Appliance
Part 3: Installing IaaS Components
Part 5: Agent, Endpoint, and Group Configuration
Part 6: Create and Publish Blueprints