Example: Onboard selected machines as a single deployment in Automation Assembler

In this example, you onboard two unmanaged machines as a single Automation Assembler deployment and create a single cloud template for all machines in the plan.

When you create a cloud account, all machines that are associated to it are data-collected and then displayed on the Resources > Virtual Machines page. If the cloud account has machines that were deployed outside of Automation Assembler, you can use an onboarding plan to allow Automation Assembler to manage the machine deployments.

Note: You can only rename deployments before they are onboarded. After onboarding, the Rename option is deactivated.

Prerequisites

• Verify that you have the required user role. See What are the VMware Aria Automation user roles.

• Review What are onboarding plans in Automation Assembler.
• Create and prepare an Automation Assembler project.
  This procedure involves some of the steps from the basic Wordpress use case. See Tutorial: Setting up and testing multi-cloud infrastructure and deployments in Automation Assembler.

  • Create a project, add users, and assign user roles in the project. See Part 2: Create the example Automation Assembler project.
  • Create an Amazon Web Services cloud account for the project. See the cloud account section of the WordPress infrastructure example.

    The Amazon Web Services cloud account in this procedure contains machines that were deployed before the cloud account was added to Automation Assembler and by an application other than Automation Assembler.

• Verify that the Resources > Virtual Machines page contains machines to onboard. See Managing resources in Cloud Assembly for more information.

Procedure

1. Go to Infrastructure > Onboarding.
2. Click New Onboarding Plan and enter sample values.

   Setting	Sample Value
   Plan name	VC-sqa-deployments
   Description	Sample onboarding plan for AWS machine for OurCo-AWS cloud account
   Cloud account	OurCo-AWS
   Default project	WordPress
   Use placements	No

3. Click Create.
4. On the plan's Deployments tab, click Select Machines, choose one or more machines, and click OK.

   

5. Select Create one deployment that contains all the machines and click Create.
6. Click the check box next to the new deployment name and click Template.
7. Click Create template in Assembler format and enter a template name, or click Assign an existing template and select the desired cloud template to assign.
   Note: Mapping templates to onboarded deployments is only for visual parity for end consumers. Onboarded deployments are not compatible with templates.
8. Click Save.
   

   Note: When your onboarding plan uses a vSphere machine, you must edit the template after the onboarding process is complete. The onboarding process cannot link the source vSphere machine and its machine template, and the resultant cloud template will contain the imageRef: "no image available" entry in the template code. The cloud template cannot be deployed until you specify the correct template name in the imageRef: field. To make it easier to locate and update the cloud template after the onboarding process is complete, use the Template name option on the deployment's Template configuration page. Record the auto-generated cloud template name or enter and record a cloud template name of your choice. When onboarding is complete, locate and open the cloud template and replace the "no image available" entry in the imageRef: field with the correct template name.
9. Click the deployment name check box, click Run, and then click Run again on the Run plan page.
   The selected machines are onboarded as a single deployment, with an accompanying cloud template.
10. To open and examine the template, click the Design > Templates page and then click the template name.
11. To open and examine the deployment, click the Resources > Deployments page and then click the deployment name.