7.2

Fabric Groups
An IaaS administrator can organize virtualization compute resources and cloud endpoints into fabric
groups by type and intent. One or more fabric administrators manage the resources in each fabric group.
Fabric administrators are responsible for creating reservations on the compute resources in their groups to
allocate fabric to specic business groups. Fabric groups are created in a specic tenant, but their resources
can be made available to users who belong to business groups in all tenants.
Business Groups
A business group associates a set of services and resources to a set of users, often corresponding to a line of
business, department, or other organizational unit.
Business groups are managed in Administration > Users and Groups and are used when creating
reservations and entitling users to items in the service catalog.
To request catalog items, a user must belong to the business group that is entitled to request the item. A
business group can have access to catalog items specic to that group and to catalog items that are shared
between business groups in the same tenant. In IaaS, each business group has one or more reservations that
determine on which compute resources the machines that this group requested can be provisioned.
A business group must have at least one business group manager, who monitors the resource use for the
group and often is an approver for catalog requests. Business groups can include support users. Support
users can request and manage machines on behalf of other group members. Business group managers can
also submit requests on behalf of their users. A user can be a member of more than one business group, and
can have dierent roles in dierent groups.
Machine Prefixes
You use machine prexes to generate the names of provisioned machines. Machine prexes are shared
across all tenants.
You should assign a default machine prex to every business group that you expect to need IaaS resources.
Every blueprint must have a machine prex or use the group default prex.
Fabric administrators are responsible for managing machine prexes. A prex is a base name to be followed
by a counter of a specied number of digits. For example, a prex of g1dw for group1 and developer
workstation, with a counter of three digits produces machines named g1dw001, g1dw002, and so on. A
prex can also specify a number other than 1 to start the counter.
If a business group is not intended to provision IaaS resources, tenant administrators do not need to assign a
default machine prex when they create the business group. If the business group is intended to provision
IaaS resources, tenant administrators should assign one of the existing machine prexes as the default for
the business group. This assignment does not restrict blueprint architects from choosing a dierent prex
when they create blueprints. A tenant administrator can change the default prex of a business group at any
time. The new default prex is used in the future, but does not aect previously provisioned machines.
Resource Reservations
You can create a reservation to allocate provisioning resources in the fabric group to a specic business
group.
A virtual reservation allocates a share of the memory, CPU and storage resources on a particular compute
resource for a business group to use.
A cloud reservation provides access to the provisioning services of a cloud service account, for
Amazon AWS, or to a virtual datacenter, for vCloud Director, for a business group to use.
Foundations and Concepts
VMware, Inc. 29