Just Another IT Blog

It's time to share some of my experiences, crazy ideas, tips and tricks !!!

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During the past several years, infrastructure Administrators came up with different methods to organize its vCenters, some with folders structures, some with fancy VMs nomenclature and prefixes.

When we think about vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC) consumption model, containers as Virtual Machines (containerVMs), we realize it kinds of disrupted this organizational model, mainly because VM's creation is no longer under administrators control,  but also because developers are now creating and deleting their own containerVMs inside vCenter without even noticing the existence of it, breaking the standards and controls applied so far by this new dynamic nature.

When a container is created by a developer within VIC, it’s respective containerVM, by default, is created in vCenter using the nomenclature of CONTAINER NAME + CONTAINER ID



For an infrastructure administrator, these VMs names are not very helpful, especially if you have controls and policies in place which depend on those VMs name.
Tools like vRealize Operations, VMware NSX or chargeback tools, might be ineffective when trying to manage and control those containerVMs.

To address these challenges, VIC 1.2.1 introduces the --container-name-convention option, which allows you to specify a prefix that will be applied to every containerVM during its creation, giving back to the administrator the control they require.

This convention option is determined during Virtual Container Host (VCH) creation. When creating your VCH there are many options available depending on your environment and your needs, I’m just focusing on --container-name-convention today, but if you are interested, check this link for the full options.

First, let’s check the prefix option based on the container name.
--container-name-convention “prefix”-{name}


This option enforces that each containerVM name will be made of the prefix you specify (in this example DEV) + the CONTAINER NAME


The second option is the prefix based on the container ID. 
--container-name-convention “prefix”-{id}


This option enforces that each containerVM name will be made of the prefix you specify (in this example PROD) + the CONTAINER ID


As you can see, it’s a win-win situation; from a developer’s point of view, nothing changes, they can still see it’s containers name and IDs just before, from a vSphere Infrastructure point of view it can create a standard that will be honored during containerVMs creation.




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