Flex Cloud | vApp Templates | Subscriber Catalog – Part 2  

Welcome to Part 2 of my blog to publish your business Services in a repeatable and easy to consume way, whether it’s a website, application, e-commerce site or IoT’s solution. 

To recap, in Part 1, you’ve already setup a Catalog that your Customers can subscribe to and built out your pre-canned Service into their infrastructures. You are now ready to template these out for quick consumption, which is what i’ll walk you through now.

So, what we haven’t got yet, is your Service configuration wrapped up in a vApp template… first off, what is a vApp?

A vApp is a simple container for your Virtual Machines (VMs) that contains the VM(s), Networking, Storage and Compute configuration that make up your Service offering to your Customers.

Why are we doing this?

Simply to get the below benefits:

  • vApp Templates of your Service giving a consistent and versioned deployment <– completed in Part 1
  • Increased Time to Value (TTV) from your services <– you are here!
  • Self- Service and easy to consume deployments of your services

How do I do it?

Prerequisites:

  • You’ve already deployed your Public Cloud Catalog and Service VMs.
  • You’ve got your VMs deployed and their respective Operating Systems and Applications up and running

The Steps:

  • Connect up to your Cloud Provider, such as The Access Cloud
  • I’ll walk you through both the “Flex client” and “HTML5” options, although the Flex is considered legacy at the time of writing.

Flex Client: https://uk1.cloud.accessalto.com/cloud/org/insert-org-name/

HTML5: https://uk1.cloud.accessalto.com/tenant/insert-org-name/

Flex Client Walkthrough:

  • Once logged in, you’ll want to navigate to “Administration” and the vApp that you wish to Publish, as below:
  • Highlight the row with the vApp you wish to Publish and hit the blue “Actions” icon to bring up the “Add to Catalog” option as displayed below:
  • Make sure you select your Public Catalog and select “Ok” to publish, you can monitor the Publish in the tasks section, as below:
  • You’ll find the vApp as a template in the “vApp Templates” tab, as below:

HTML5 Walkthrough:

  • Once logged in, you’ll want to navigate to “Datacentres” and select your VDC as below:
  • Under the “Compute” option on the left, select “vApps” to bring up your vApp Service view as below:
  • Select “Actions” icon on your vApp container to bring up the “Add to Catalog” option as displayed below:
  • Make sure you select your Public Catalog and select “Ok” to publish
  • Once you are satisfied with your naming convcention and have confirmed Your Service configuration, hit OK to save and publish to your Service Catalog. You can monitor the publishing vApp in the tasks section, as below:
  • In the HTML5 view, you’ll find your vApp as a template in the new “Content Libraries” area, navigate to the menu button “3-lines in the top left” and select “Libraries”.  You’ll see a section for vApp Templates which you can see our new “Dev” vApp below:

That’s it for both user interfaces, you’ve got your first version of your service offering ready to be deployed in minutes to other customers running in The Cloud.

In summary, this one time full deployment using vApp Templates allows the capture and publish of your Service in a consistent and versioned deployment method, don’t forget, this can be updated and re-published by new versions of your Service as required.

Coming up, Part 3, how your Customer can get subscribed to your Services on The Access Cloud.