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vCloud Automation Center VirtualMachine.Network Property Definition changes

December 9, 2014

“VMTurbo"
A couple of moths back i wrote an article about how to select virtual machine (VM) network placement while deploying a VM via vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) soon to be renamed to vRealize Automation (vRA). You can find the blog post here.

I have received a couple of questions over the past months and they have all been related to the new behaviour in vCAC 6.1 in terms of vCAC Network Profiles that can be used to let vCAC act as a DHCP server for the provisioned VMs.

In earlier versions we used the following Properties in the Property Dictionaries -> Properties Definitions section when you wanted vCAC to assign IP addresses to VMs:

  • VirtualMachine.NetworkN.Name – To determine what vCAC Network Path (e.g. vSphere port group) to use.
  • VirtualMachine.NetworkN.ProfileName – To determine what vCAC Network Profile to use.

This configuration does not seem to be valid anymore and you have to use a new Property called VirtualMachine.NetworkN.NetworkProfileName.
You can actually use this Property alone and does not need to combine it with another one. When selecting the VirtualMachine.NetworkN.NetworkProfileName, vCAC will automatically select the corresponding Network Path for you.

So the below is an example configuration including two Network Profiles in vCAC you can select between when you request a VM from a catalog.

  1. Create the Network Profiles
    Screen Shot 2014-12-09 at 12.33.31
  2. Configure each Network Profile to include DHCP functionality.
    VM.NetProfile-01
    Screen Shot 2014-12-09 at 12.52.18Screen Shot 2014-12-09 at 13.09.30
    VM-NetProfile-02
    Screen Shot 2014-12-09 at 12.52.29Screen Shot 2014-12-09 at 13.09.51
  3. Add the Network Profiles to your vCAC Reservation
    Screen Shot 2014-12-09 at 12.33.11
  4. Add the VirtualMachine.NetworkN.NetworkProfileName as a Property in the Property Dictionary -> Property Definitions section.
    Name it VirtualMachine.Network0.NetworkProfileName since it will cover the first NIC for the VMs we deploy.
    Screen Shot 2014-12-09 at 12.54.58
  5. Add a Property Attribut to the newly created Property including a drop-down list with the selectable Network Profiles. use a comma separated list.

This is all you need to do.

Now you can request VMs from your vCAC Catalog and select the Network Profile of your choice.
Screen Shot 2014-12-09 at 13.18.52
First we select a VM that will get an IP address on the 10.10.1 network via the vCAC Network Profile VM-NetProfile-01Screen Shot 2014-12-09 at 13.18.41
The we select a VM that will get an IP address on the 10.10.2 network via the vCAC Network Profile VM-NetProfile-02 Screen Shot 2014-12-09 at 13.18.21

 

When the requests are complete we can verify the IP Allocation works correct.

  1. The VM Demo70 was requested to get an IP from VM-NetProfile-01 (10.10.1 network) as you can see by this vCAC Request information
    Screen Shot 2014-12-09 at 13.23.11
  2. As you can see from the vCAC Network Profile view it has been assigned IP address 10.10.1.111
    Screen Shot 2014-12-09 at 13.21.59
  3. The vSphere Web Client shows you the same thing
    Screen Shot 2014-12-09 at 13.22.32
  4. The VM Demo71 was requested to get an IP from VM-NetProfile-02 (10.10.2 network) as you can see by this vCAC Request information
    Screen Shot 2014-12-09 at 13.23.29
  5. As you can see from the vCAC Network Profile view it has been assigned IP address 10.10.2.111
    Screen Shot 2014-12-09 at 13.22.12
  6. The vSphere Web Client shows you the same thing
    Screen Shot 2014-12-09 at 13.22.53

Below are two useful documents for vCAC 6.1:

Thanks to Alex López  for bringing up the question initially and providing troubleshooting.

 

 

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  1. vCloud Automation Center network selection during VM request | VCDX56

    December 9, 2014 at 1:50 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment

    […] to select the VM destination network when requesting the Service w2k8 form the Service Catalog, vCloud Automation Center 6.1 VirtualMachine.Network Property Definition changes is another blog post that covers the vCAC Network selection part. It also includes the Network […]

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