Provisioning a VM

Possibly the most complex operation that is performed by the out-of-the-box Automation Engine is that of provisioning a VM. The process is, however, designed to be extremely flexible, and allows a great deal of customisation based on tagging, the requesting user's group membership, and the destination Provider type (e.g. RHEV, VMware, OpenStack, etc.). It uses all of the Automation features that we've discussed so far in the book.

The Provisioning Process

The VM Provisioning Process starts with a user (the requester) selecting Provision VMs from under the Infrastructure -> Virtual Machines -> Lifecycle button group:

This takes us into a selection dialog where we pick a Template to provision from, and click the Continue button:

Once we click Continue, we enter into the VM Provisioning workflow, starting with information retrieved from the Profile and moving into the State Machine.

The Provisioning Profile and the VM Provisioning State Machine

Provisioning a VM involves many separate steps and decisions. Some of these need to be performed or evaluated in the context of the requesting user's group membership (such as quota evaluation, or custom VM naming), while others are more generic to all VM provisioning operations. The Provisioning/Group Profile contains the group-specific Attributes, Instance and State Machine names that are used in processing the provisioning Request, and in preparing the provisioning Task(s).

The VM Provisioning State Machine is processed in the context of the provisioning Task, and contains the sequence of steps involved in actually provisioning the VM.