Example: Onboard machines with template and mapping

In this example, you onboard two vSphere machines in Automation Assembler that you associate with an existing template and map the machines to the resources in the template.

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.

After onboarding, running the Update day 2 action on the onboarded deployments applies the new changes to the existing resources.

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 an Automation Assembler project, add users, and assign user roles in the project. See Part 2: Create the example Automation Assembler project.
• Create a vCenter cloud account for the project. See Create a basic vCenter cloud account in VMware Aria Automation.

  The vCenter 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.
• Verify that you have a template where the number of machines that you onboard matches the template resources. During onboarding, you can't have resources that are not assigned to a machine.

Procedure

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

   Setting	Sample Value
   Plan name	VC-sqa-deployments-mapped
   Description	Sample onboarding plan for vSphere machine with mapping
   Cloud account	OurCo-vCenter
   Default project	Onboarding Project
   Use placements	No

3. Click Create.
4. On the plan's Deployments tab, click New > With Cloud Template.
5. On the Create Deployments page, select the cloud template that you want to associate with the deployment.
6. Select to map the discovered VMs to the resources in the template.
   Note: Mapping is supported only for onboarding plans with vSphere accounts.
7. Click Next.
8. Assign a virtual machine to each resource from the template.
   1. Next to the resource name, click Select VM.
   2. Select a discovered virtual machine and then click Select.
   To preview the machine within the template, click View Template. To go back to the onboarding plan, click the Infrastructure tab.
9. Click Create.
10. Click the deployment name check box, click Run, and then click Run again on the Run plan page.
    The selected machines are onboarded and mapped to an accompanying cloud template.
11. To open and examine the template, click the Design > Templates page and then click the template name.
12. To open and examine the deployment, click the Resources > Deployments page and then click the deployment name.