Automating vCAC Tenant Creation with vCO: Part 7 Creating a vCAC Catalog Item

In this series we will see how to automate the creation of a tenant in vCAC using vCO. There are multiple tasks to provision a tenant in vCAC, so even though it is an automation product itself, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t look at automating parts of it too.

In part 7 we look at publishing our Create-Tenant vCO workflow back into vCAC as a catalog item to make for easy consumption of it. (At some point I will get round to automating this part too)

We’ll be publishing this catalog item to the default tenant (vsphere.local if you look at the list of tenants), so it’s worthwhile making sure that you have other user accounts which can access it other than the default [email protected].

So we need to create an Identity Store for the default tenant and add some Administrator groups:

Ensure that the Administrator group has the Service Architect role which will grant the use of Advanced Services. We then need to logout of the webpage and back in to enable the Advanced Services tab to appear.

At this point if you are using a vCO server external to vCAC (as I am in my lab) you will want to ensure that you have enabled AD authentication to it and provided an admins group.

This makes it straightforward to now configure vCAC to use an external vCO server using an AD account.

We also need to make sure the Default Tenant has a Business Group so that we will be able to publish Catalog Items.

Navigate to Advanced Services and Service Blueprints, then add a new one:

We can now see the vCO directory structure presented to us to drill down through and find the workflow to publish, Create-vCACTenant.

Navigate through the wizard to complete the addition. Firstly, accept the default name.

On the Blueprint Form tab we have some options to amend the presentation of the form. Mostly this is picked up from the vCO workflow presentation, but it can be configured further here.