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.

Once the machines are onboarded, you can run most Day 2 actions on the deployment, except the Update day 2 action.

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 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 New > Without Cloud Template.
5. On the Create Deployments page, select Create a single deployment for a group of selected machines.
6. Select one or more machines and click Create.

   

7. Click the check box next to the new deployment name and click Template.
8. Click Assign an existing template and select the desired cloud template to assign.
   Note: Attaching a template without mapping its resources to will not enable template-specific actions.
9. Click Save.
   
10. 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.
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.