In my daily work I am dealing with vRealize but curiosity about other solutions has directed me to CloudForms provided by RedHat
Based on RedHat web page
Red Hat® CloudForms® is an infrastructure management platform that allows IT departments to control users’ self-service abilities to provision, manage, and ensure compliance across virtual machines and private clouds.
so let’s do the implementation and set up a VM with CloudForms on our vCenter
Deployment
CloudForms is delivered in ova, so deployment from vCenter is not difficult and does not require any configuration
Configuration
after starting the machine and logging in with the default user and password which is root / smartvm, we can run a menu that allows you to configure the tool
so let’s configure the network
Choose 1 on menu and provide information
After configuration we have summary where we can see information that CF not working yet
to run it we need to configure database. So press 7 on menu and follow the steps
The DB requiere another empty partition so you need to add it to appliance
as we have only one server then everythin will be on it
After providing pass, configuration start preparing our server
and also we have summary
Adding Endpoint
After configuration we are abel to login via web browser and start work with CloudForms directly.
First element which we have to configured is Endpoint, as we have vCenter in place let’s add it
Go to Compute –> Infrastructure –> Providers
add new one
We need to provide hostname or IP, our name and credentials
which add vCenter as Infrastructure Providers
and in few second data collection grab whole information from it
Create Dialog
For service catalog we need a form where we provide all data for VM provisionig so go to Automation –> Automate –> Customization
and add new dialog
For test purpose I’ve created only dialog with text field and all required data will hard code in element on catalog
Create Service Catalog
we have dialog (form) so now we are able to create service catalog for end user. Go to Services –> Catalog Items
and create the new element for vCenter
We have to choose our dialog and Provisioning entry point
which is out of bos element to clone VM from template
In Request info we are providing all details about VM
and after finish we have our newly created catalog item in list
at the first tab we mark check box to show this in catalog so now we can use it in the same way as if we were a end user
End User Service
Login to end user portal
http://hostname/self_service
and in service catalog we can see the newly created element
We can open it and add to cart
and from it we can order
those task are automatically approved based on built-in policy
So we only need to wait for the end and we will have our VM in CloudForms and vCenter
So not to bad but I think that this tool can be more powerful using different workflow or we can use created by us Ansible script so I think that in the futue need to take a look closer on it