My company has recently acquired vCAC as part of the vCloud Suite. We provide VM hosting as a service to departments within the company. Were trying to allow self provisioning of VMs through vCAC. We have the very basics set up and are able to clone off machines from templates. I have been searching high and low with little success to find a complete guide to provide some of the basic level advanced features. Would anyone out there be willing to point me in the direction of some good literature that would guide us through some advanced features.
To start were looking to do something very simple by creating a "sandbox" for our developers to quickly stand up development servers. Were looking for the following:
- Clone Windows 2012 R2 VM from an existing template (does this need to be configured in some particular fashion? sysprepped? would i be able to do the rest of this if it were a new vm instead of a clone?)
- Place the new machine in the "Sandbox" vCenter folder (I achieved this by using the custom property of "VMware.VirtualCenter.Folder)
- Allow the user to select a unique hostname for vCenter and the machine name (i achieved this for vCenter using a custom property of "Hostname")
- Set the Time Zone
- Configure the networking on the next available IP in a single /24 subnet block (i set up a network profile but am not sure how that gets applied, do i need the windows agent?)
- Create Active Directory Computer object in "AD/OU/Sandbox" OU (I havent attempted this and assume i need to write a custom powershell script thats called, any advice from people who have done this would be greatly appreciated)
- Join the machine to active directory
I've configured a build profile that specifies most of these settings but they don't apply at build. I've read a lot about the windows client but that doesn't seem to be necessary for any of these steps as they should all be accomplished by the sysprep commands in the build profile. Any guidance anyone can provide would be greatly appreciated!
-Paul