Example: Onboard selected machines as a single deployment in Cloud Assembly

In this example, you onboard two unmanaged machines as a single Cloud Assembly 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 > Resources > Virtual Machines page. If the cloud account has machines that were deployed outside of Cloud Assembly, you can use an onboarding plan to allow Cloud Assembly to manage the machine deployments.

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

Prerequisites

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

• Review What are onboarding plans in Cloud Assembly.
• Create and prepare a Cloud Assembly 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 Cloud Assembly.

  • Create a project, add users, and assign user roles in the project. See Part 2: Create the example Cloud Assembly 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 Cloud Assembly and by an application other than Cloud Assembly.

• Verify that the Resources > 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

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 Cloud template....
7. Click Create Cloud Template in Cloud Assembly format and enter a Cloud Template name, or click Assign an existing Cloud Template and select the desired Cloud Template to assign.
   Note: Mapping Cloud Templates to onboarded deployments is only for visual parity for end consumers. Onboarded deployments are not compatible with Cloud Templates.
8. Click Save.
   

   Note: When your onboarding plan uses a vSphere machine, you must edit the cloud 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 cloud 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 Cloud template name option on the deployment's Cloud 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. Open and examine the cloud template by clicking the Design > Cloud templates page and then clicking the cloud template name.
11. Open and examine the deployment by clicking the Resources > Deployments page and then clicking the deployment name.