THIS EXTENSION IS NO LONGER MAINTAINED
I want to thank all of you that have downloaded and used this module. We never expected it to be as widely used as it has been. We decided to stop maintaining this because it was originally built as an example of how one could achieve this capability. Much to our surprise it has been deployed into countless production environments. As a result we have received countless requests for support which we cannot provide.
Their is good news however. Their is a commercially available supported product that is capable to doing much more than this module is capable of. For more information See article on SovLabs Hostname Module
Overview
One of the most frequent asks when using vRA is, “How do I deploy machines using my company’s hostnaming standards automatically using vRA?” Since the out-of-the box hostnaming only provides a way to do prefix-suffix, the answer to this question usually is that it will require customization.
This solution is intended to provide a way to implement this functionality by using a small, highly versatile custom extension which can handle 95% of use cases without writing custom code.
The rest of this article contains instructions on installing and configuring the vRA Custom Hostnaming Extension. This extension allows administrators to model very specific custom hostnaming schemes for their vRA virtual machines, Deployments, and vCloud Director vApps using vRA custom properties, with dynamic creation of stock machine prefixes and index tracking for each unique hostname combination.
This extension is proof-of-concept or demo grade. While it runs well and consistently, it has not been put through a formal quality assurance process, so please use with caution.