VCF Automation – How to Create Provider Managed Blueprint

Content Hub in VCF Automation provides access to Content Libraries which store VM templates (OVA) and media (ISO), VM images (OVA templates), custom Orchestrator workflows and Blueprints. Blueprints allow more sophisticated definition of an application with multiple VMs, load balancers, etc and can be deployed with single click and will show as Deployment instance in the tenant namespace.

This blog post will show a very simple example where the provider creates and shares a blueprint with a single VM deployed from the global content library template. This will show the mechanics of the process to enable you to create more elaborate application blueprints involving multiple load balanced VMs, volumes and kubernetes clusters.

Provider Setup

As a provider create (global) Content Library and upload your template – e.g. photon-hw15-5.0-dde71ec57.x86_64. This Content Library is automatically shared to all tenants.

In Feature Flags enable Provider Consumption Org feature. This will create a new Provider Consumption Org tenant (organization) which is using provider IdP, has built in Orchestrator configured and most importantly for our use case can publish blueprints to other organizations.

Open the Provider Consumption Org (Launch Organization Portal), go to Build & Deploy tab and in Content Hub section select Blueprint Design and create new blueprint from Blank canvas.

Name the blueprint, optionally add description and icon, select default project and enable catalog item sharing.

Paste the following Code into the Code window next to the canvas.

formatVersion: 2
inputs:
  vm-name:
    type: string
  supervisornamespace-name:
    type: string
resources:
  CCI_Supervisor_Namespace_1:
    type: CCI.Supervisor.Namespace
    properties:
      name: '${input.supervisornamespace-name}'
      existing: true
  CCI_Supervisor_Resource_1:
    type: CCI.Supervisor.Resource
    properties:
      context: ${resource.CCI_Supervisor_Namespace_1.id}
      manifest:
        apiVersion: vmoperator.vmware.com/v1alpha3
        kind: VirtualMachine
        metadata:
          name: ${input.vm-name}
          labels:
            vm-selector: ${input.vm-name}
        spec:
          className: best-effort-xsmall
          imageName: photon-hw15-5.0-dde71ec57.x86_64
          powerState: PoweredOn
          storageClass: standard

Make sure that the VM spec className, imageName and storageClass refer to the correct VM class, template name and storage profile that is used in your VCFA instance.

Click on Version button at the bottom and Publish the catalog item. Then click Close button.

Tenant Consumption

As an Org administration log into your Organization and in Build & Deploy tab select Catalog and enable switch Show items without a project. This will reveal our published catalog item.