vCloud Automation Center – vCAC 5.1 – Connecting to vCenter

In my last post I covered how to connect vCAC to Amazon EC2 which I  hope was useful for many it appears to have received a lot of  attention.  In this post I’m going to walk you through how to connect  vCAC to vCenter.  Be sure that you have completed the steps in the below  posts before you connect to vCenter:

• vCloud Automation Center- vCAC 5.1 – What to know before you install!
• vCloud Automation Center- vCAC 5.1 – vCAC Manager Installation
• vCloud Automation Cetner – vCAC 5.1 – DEM Installation
• vCloud Automation Center – vCAC 5.1 – Laying the foundation

What were going to configure

In order to configure vSphere integration we are going to setup some additional components of vCAC as outlined below:

1. Credentials -Credentials will be utilized by out  endpoints to authenticate us to the infrastructure element managers that  we are going to communicate with.
2. End Point– Endpoints are how we manage connections  from vCAC to other infrastructure elements in the environment.  There  are endpoints that allow us to communicate with EC2, vCenter, vCloud  Director, vCenter Orchestrator, Hyper-V, NetApp Filers, as well as  Physical Servers such as HP iLO, Dell iDrac, and Cisco UCS.
3. Install the vSphere Proxy Agent– The vSphere proxy  agent is like a DEM, only it has pre-programmed workflows that perform a  specific function.  In this case the function will be to communicate  with vCenter.  Proxy agents are a bit legacy and will hopefully be  ported to the new DEM architecture in the future.
4. Enterprise Group– Although we already created  an Enterprise Group we are going to add vSphere Compute Resources to  the group in this exercise.  For more information on what Enterprise  Groups are see my earlier article “vCloud Automation Center – Laying the foundation“.
5. Reservations– A resource reservation is how we  provide available resources to our provisioning groups.  Resource  Reservation are a one to one mapping to provisioning groups.  Resource  reservation will get created for any type of resources you want to make  available to your groups.  In this exercise we will be creating a  virtual vSphere reservation.
6. Global Blueprints– A Blueprint is really a service  definition that details what the consumer can request and all the  policies and configuration of that service.  We will create a virtual  blueprint that a consumer can request through the service catalog in  this example. I will cover Blueprints in greater detail in another  article.

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