7.3

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 specific 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 different roles in different groups.
Machine Prefixes
You use machine prefixes to generate the names of provisioned machines. Machine prefixes are shared
across all tenants.
You should assign a default machine prefix to every business group that you expect to need IaaS
resources. Every blueprint must have a machine prefix or use the group default prefix.
Fabric administrators are responsible for managing machine prefixes. A prefix is a base name to be
followed by a counter of a specified number of digits. For example, a prefix of g1dw for group1 and
developer workstation, with a counter of three digits produces machines named g1dw001, g1dw002, and
so on. A prefix 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 prefix 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 prefixes as the
default for the business group. This assignment does not restrict blueprint architects from choosing a
different prefix when they create blueprints. A tenant administrator can change the default prefix of a
business group at any time. The new default prefix is used in the future, but does not affect previously
provisioned machines.
Resource Reservations
You can create a reservation to allocate provisioning resources in the fabric group to a specific 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.
Foundations and Concepts
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