You use policies to manage deployments requested from the VMware Aria Automation Service Broker catalog with a defined set of rules.

Policies include definitions that are a set of rules or parameters for a specific use. The definition commonly includes the scope and enforcement type. The scope of a definition determines whether the policy is applicable to all deployments in an organization or only deployments in a selected project.
Table 1. VMware Aria Automation Service Broker Policy Types

Policy

Description

Approval policy

You can approve a deployment or day-2 action before a request is provisioned.

Lease policy

You can set a workload lease policy.

Day-2 actions policy

You can select the actions that can be performed on a workload post deployment.
When a project member requests a cloud template, there can be more than one policy that apply. An enforcement type defines how multiple policies are evaluated, ranked, and, where applicable, merged, to produce an effective policy. An effective policy produces the intended results but is not always a specific named policy.
Table 2. VMware Aria Automation Service Broker Policy Enforcement Types

Enforcement Type

Description

Hard

Ranked higher than soft policies

Soft

Overridden by hard policies
During the evaluation phase, VMware Aria Automation Service Broker first identifies and ranks policies.

  1. Policy types are evaluated:

    • If there are hard and soft policies, only the hard policies are considered and ranked.

    • If there are only soft policies, the soft policies are ranked.

  2. Policies with an organization scope are ranked higher than policies with a project scope.

  3. Policies with earlier creation dates are ranked higher than policies with later creation dates. Post ranking, policies are evaluated to identify the merge order.

  4. The highest-ranking policy becomes the baseline.

  5. The second-level ranking policy is applied next, and so on.

  6. If a policy is incompatible with the preceding policies, this policy is discarded and marked as ineffective.

Table 3. Example Lease Policy

Goal

Example Configuration

Effective Policy Behavior

A default organization-level policy that allows the project-level policy values to influence the applied values.

Organization Policy = Soft

  • Grace period: 10

  • Lease: 100

  • Total Lease: 100

Project A Policy 1 = Soft

  • Lease: 20

  • Total Lease: 50

Project B Policy 1 = Soft

  • Lease: 10

  • Total Lease: 30

A member of project A requests a catalog item.

Project B is not considered because it is not applicable to project A deployments.

Merged effective policy:

  • Grace period: 10

  • Lease: 20

  • Total Lease: 100
Table 4. Design Decisions on Policies for VMware Aria Automation Service Broker in VMware Aria Automation

Decision ID

Design Decision

Design Justification

Design Implication

PCA-VAA-SB-CFG-005

Identify and apply goals for your organization and each project based on the applicability of available policy types.

By understanding how the policies are processed, you can meet organizational goals without creating an excessive and unmanageable number of policies.

For each policy type, you must determine the applicability and your organizational goals to design policy enforcement and scope that results in the desired effective policy.