vCAC by default will place all provisioned machines into a vCenter folder named VRM. You can override this using the custom property VMware.VirtualCenter.Folder to tell vCAC where to place the provisioned machine. While this is great that you can tell vCAC where to place the provisioned machine it isn’t very flexible. I built the Custom vCenter Folder Extension to fix that and make folder placement as flexible as you need it to be. VM folder placement is just about organizing virtual machines. It provides a way to control access to these machines through vCenter as well. Many organizations control permissions to these environments using these folders and need to be able to place any machine where they need for these purposes.
Multi-Machine blueprints is another area where this extension adds value. You can control placement of virtual machines by defining the VMware.VirtualCenter.Folder property on a Multi-Machine blueprint folder, but all VM’s for all Multi-Machine apps are placed in the same folder creating confusion as to which VM’s belong to which Multi-Machine application. Now if you add NSX into the mix and you have Multi-Machine components spread all over the place with no way to easily determine which VM’s as well as NSX Edges go to which application.
When used with Multi-Machine blueprints the Custom vCEnter Folder Extension can place all component Virtual Machines as well as Deployed NSX Edge appliances in a folder named after the Multi-Machine application if you desire making it easy to identify related components of an application. This also allows you to easily permission vCenter access to the components of the application if necessary.
Features
- Dynamic Folder Names based on custom naming scheme
- Multi-Machine folder placement including NSX Edge applince
- Automatic Multi-Machine folder removal when Multi-Machine app is destroyed