6.2

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. In IaaS, group managers also create and manage
machine blueprints for the groups they manage. Business groups can also contain support users, who
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.
Every business group has a default machine prefix. 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.
When tenant administrators create a business group, they must assign one of the existing machine
prefixes as its default. This assignment does not restrict business group managers 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
A fabric administrator creates 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.
A physical reservation is a set of physical machines reserved for a business group to use. Unprovisioned
physical machines must be added to a physical reservation before being provisioned or imported, and
cannot be removed until they are decommissioned and become unprovisioned.
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.
A business group can have multiple reservations on the same compute resource or different compute
resources, or any number of physical reservations containing any number of physical machines.
Foundations and Concepts
VMware, Inc. 29