Does anybody know if there are any plans/discussions around having an Entitlement that crosses business groups?
In a certain operational model that allows for both self service server requests, but ALSO managed support... there could be a need for a GROUP of people to have the same Resource Actions in every business group.
For example, maybe you have a Windows Engineering team who will support machines in each business group, but won't be doing catalog or service requests. The way that we have been handling that based on how vRA is set up is to:
1. Have a BASE entitlement for the business group which defines what the BASE AD Group can request, including: Services of Catalog Items and Resource Actions (we are trying not to use direct Catalog Entitlements)
2. Have another entitlement for a Support Group which has Resource Actions defined (some actions are different than the Base entitlement).
Due to operational constraints in our environment, it is actually 6 such entitlements (1. Base, 2. Cloud Engineering, 3. Windows Engineering, 4. Linux Engineering, 5. Ops Bridge Engineering, and 6. the vRO based vRA-Plugin-Service-Account).
If all 6 types of Entitlement groups need a new action, we have to add it 6 times per business group. We plan on having 50 business groups. That is 300 times adding an action and prone to error.
I have automated around the potential for errors and manual effort through a set of defined Element Arrays (of Resource Actions) in vRO and ASD.... so we update ONE array for each Entitlement type and then stamp the defined array across the appropriate business group entitlements, but the reality is that I wouldn't need to do that for the Entitlements that are exactly the same across ALL the business groups (support teams and service account) IF the product supported what I will call Global Entitlements. I should be able to create an entitlement of actions for an AD group of users, and then check the business groups where I want that entitlement linked.
I know that is backwards to how the product currently works with entitlements rolling up under a business group.
Thoughts? Other ways? Things I am missing?