Working with Services

We have seen that we can use CloudForms to easily provision VMs from the Infrastructure -> Virtual Machines -> Lifecycle or Clouds -> Instances -> Lifecycle button groups. This does however require the requester to supply values for all of the VM Provisioning Dialog options, for every provision request.

CloudForms enables us to create Service Catalogs. These contain Catalog Items, and Bundles of Items, to enable users to provision one or more VMs (or other components) from a single Order button:

When we create a Service Catalog Item, we pre-select the VM Provisioning Dialog options, and optionally create a Service Dialog to allow for user input when the service is ordered. In this way we can create pre-configured service definitions that suit our own use cases, for example, offering small, medium or large to specify VM sizes:

The remaining sections in this chapter discuss the details of creating and using Service Catalogs.