One of the new features in vRealize Automation is the Component Profiles feature. With component profiles you can add two new (standard) drop down lists in your vRA request form: VM t-shirts sizes and VM images. So, no need for a custom vRO t-shirt size workflow anymore and you can provide a user with different images within a vSphere VM that’s part of a blueprint. By using component profiles you can further consolidate your blueprints.
What are t-shirt sizes? With t-shirt sizes you predefine standarized virtual machines sizes that can be requested from the vRA self-service portal. This is most of the time a better option than letting the user choose the required number of CPUs and amount of RAM, which will result in different (non-standarized) configuration in your environment.
Okay, let’s have a closer look at how this works. The first step is to configure the value sets for the two component profiles that are available: Image and Size. You can configure these component profiles under Administration->Property Dictionairy->Component Profiles.
The value set will contain the values that will be displayed in the VM request. For Image this will be a list of available VM images that you want to display (and make selectable) in the request. For size you will have to configure the different VM sizes.
Let’s first have a look at the latter option:
As you can see you can configure the number of CPU’s, amount of RAM and the available storage. First define all required VM sizes here; in the converged blueprint designer you can select a subset and only publish certain sizes for a particular virtual machine:
If we look at the image component profile, we can pre-configure different image settings:
- You can specifiy the action where the image applies to (create, clone, linked clone, NetApp flexclone);
- The blueprint type (server or desktop);
- Of course the base image;
- The customization specification and the provision workflow.
Things we look like this:
The power of this component profile is in the ability to provide different images as part of the vSphere VM that’s included in a blueprint. So in this example you can configure a CentOS VM, and let the user choose if he wants CentOS 7.1, 7.2 or 7.3. All within the same blueprint. For the image component profile you define the value set, after that you can make a subselection in the blueprint (if applicable). Notice that if you use the image and size component profile, the build information and machine resources tab will be greyed out in the interface.
After everything is configured, you get two new options in the request form for your VM. The final request will look like this:
I hope this was helpful, note that currently component profiles only work for vSphere virtual machines.
Happy automating!
