One of the best things introduced at the end of 2014 with our friends in vCloud Air was the ability to be a true pay as you go option. Many customer calls I’ve been on have been focused around being able to finally use cloud bursting into vCA without incurring the on going cost of a monthly agreement with VPC or Dedicated. Even more beneficial of course is the fact that all workloads are portable between the vSphere on prem. and vCA. Now let’s show how you can use vRA as your CMP with your new on demand data center in vCloud Air.
Warning*** This walk through is only validated for vRA 6.2 as there were many enhancements to the vCloud endpoint.
In this walk through there are 3 specific pre-reqs that exist
- vRA 6.2 installed and configured
- vRA fabric and infrastructure admin rights
- vCA login with on demand enabled
Before we begin let’s start by logging into your vCA account and select your “Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand”
Now we need to grab two details from this URL
- First is your base url this will be in the format of “https://REGION.vchs.vmware.com” this will be used to connect to the host url in vRA interface.
- Copy the data between “orgName=” and “&” this is needed to enter your organization in the vRA interface.
With these two items we can now log into the vRA interface and go to the Infrastructure tab -> Endpoints -> Endpoints -> New Endpoint -> Cloud -> vApp
Fill out the form with the data you collected.
- Name – Select a specific name you want to use
- Address – This should come from your URL copied above *Note you need to append /api/compute to the URL. Example is http://us-california-1-3.vchs.vmware.com/api/compute
- Credentials – Create the credentials you used to log into vCA
- Organization – this will be the data you copied from the orgName= in the URL above
Now that you have that we can do a Data Collection to validate the settings worked
This will take a few moments but once complete you will refresh and see that it succeeded.
Navigate to your Fabric Groups
Based on this endpoint you will now see the option to add the resources to your Fabric Group.
From this point forward you can create the reservation, build blueprints, and deploy machines!
