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vCloud Automation Center – vCAC – Workflow and Script to Change CPU’s to Cores

During a POC something was brought to my attention that I haven’t heard anyone ask for before, but it seems like a very useful and valid need. The ask was to be able to set CPU Cores during provisioning rather than CPU’s. Operating Systems and other apps license by sockets, not cores so instead of having 8 CPU Sockets with 1 core, why not have 1 CPU Socket with 8 Cores. So I decided to build a solution that would solve this and change the CPU Sockets to Cores.

Now I prefer to do as much as I can in the design center and with the WorkFlow stubs because then they will work for everyone without the need for the CDK so taking that into consideration here is what I have built.

Background Info:

I am executing my script at the MachineProvisioned state of the virtual machines lifecycle. This can mean different things based on the provisioning type that is selected. If we are talking about cloning then it means that the clone has finished, vCAC hardware customization has taken place, Customization Specification has executed, any operation performed by the guest agent are complete and the VM for all intents is complete.Using the WFStubMachineProvisioned workflow however I can perform additional operations before the machine is handed off to the owner. In this case I’m using the workflow stub to execute a powershell script named SocketsToCores.
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vCloud Automation Center – vCAC 5.2 is offically GA and available for download!

vCAC 5.2 was officially released yesterday and made available publicly on the VMware website located here. Although it’s available on customers that have licenses for the product can access the download. Currently there is no public trial available.

New features in vCAC 5.2

  • Enhanced vCloud Director Integration – Support for Pay as you go, Reservations of partial oVDC’s, Individual management of VM’s within a vApp, and management of existing vApps.
  • Support for KVM – KVM support is adopted through the use of RedHat Enterprise Virtualization Manager 3.1 and supports provisioning of machines and management capabilities for the provisioned managed VM’s.
  • vCloud Networking and Security (vCNS) – Supports provisioning of machines into existing VXLAN’s, Security Groups, as well as load balancers.
  • Customizable Reclamation Workflows – This is an enhancement to vCAC’s reclamation workflows which were previously very static and not customizable. In this release you now have the ability to customize a new lease length and the wait time before enforcing the new lease period.
  • SRM Compatibility – Notice the word compatibility. vCAC will not discover both the primary and recovery VM and allow management of only the primary. So no real functional support for SRM, but it is at least now compatible and able to function in SRM environment.
  • Windows 2012 Managed Guest OS – vCAC 5.2 now offers support for Windows 2012 as a guest operating system.
  • Lot’s of bug fixes – If you read the release notes located here, you will see there are about 5 pages of resolved issues.

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