Creating a Specified Amount of Client Workstations for a Deployment

[Bushbaker27]

In Aria Assembler, I have created a blueprint that allows users to request environments for them to test on. Right now, the request will create four servers: three of which are Application Servers and one is a Workstation.

I want to give my users the ability to specify how many workstations will be a part of their deployment/environment. How can I allow an unknown amount (>= 1) workstations to be added from Assembler blueprints?

I have this blueprint subscribed to a workflow in Orchestrator. I attempted to do clones of the single client machine after it was configured, but that ended in all client machines having the same DNS name. I would much rather have Assembler handle the amount of workstations to create and then Orchestrator can configure them individually.

[xian_]

You need the count property, see User input in vRealize Automation requests (vmware.com)

[Bushbaker27]

Hey xian_, thanks for that resource.

I am researching for this now, but do you know of a way to have the name of the machine be dynamically set? For example, say I have one Client machine deploying, then the name of that machine would be "Client". Then consider the case where I might want three client machines, so the resource names would then be "Client1", "Client2" and "Client3" respectively.

Is there any way to iterate count and append an integer to the end of the standard name for all machines in Assembler. Or would this better be handled in Orchestrator?

I know about Custom Names. But I don't want the counter to infinitely count upward. Just iterate through the current deployment's amount of client machines.

[xian_ · Accepted solution]

Custom names is one solution. Another one is the original project custom naming Create project-by-project custom names for deployed resources in Cloud Assembly (vmware.com)

Another option is an EBS with an Orchestrator workflow or ABX action: in this case you'll need to handle the dynamic names. A good explanation is at Custom Naming in vRA8 | samperrin.com

You say you don't want the counter to increase infinitely... How do you intend to avoid hostname collision then?

[Bushbaker27]

Thank you for the additional resources! We tested out the Project Custom Name but found it won't work for our situation. Three servers have standard naming convention (i.e. ${resource.name}) and the last server needs to have the number appended (i.e. ${resource.name}${##}). I cannot accomplish that with Custom Names.

I'll have to look into the samperrin.com example you gave.

Hostnames will remain unique without the infinite counting. At my place of work, we have the deployment requestor specify a deployment name and use validation in Service Broker to ensure that this deployment name is unique. Then the Hostnames get assembled by a few rules. An example hostname generated from this process would look like (EALASVTESTESS). This takes care of uniqueness while telling our engineers a bit about the VM by the name.