Self Service naming policies ?

davx8342

Hi there,

I'm looking for documentation on the self service feature of Xen Orchestra and my google-fu is failing me. I've been looking in particular at https://xen-orchestra.com/docs/ but I can't find "self service" mentioned in the column on the left?

I'm trying to figure out how the self service feature works, in particular, how I can enforce a naming scheme for the VMs provisioned from templates. Because the workloads I might use are Windows VMs, which are domain joined, I don't want users to have the ability to specify their own names.

I understand the cloud config uses {name}% which appends a number on to the end of the name. However, the tooltip that appears when you click the 'i' suggests that this just appends a number to the name the user gives the vm.

So if I wanted a standard naming scheme, for example -

<2 letter geographic tag>-<group name>-<number>

I want XO to manage the <number> and keep track of which numbers have been assigned already. So for example -

uk-test-1
uk-test-3
uk-test-9

Etc.

Is this possible as XO stands today? I'm currently using source built XO.

I'm trying to evaluate how much of our existing self service capability we have built out in VMware that I can replicate in XO.

Thanks.

olivierlambert

Hi!

In the doc, there's a search bar, where you can enter "self" and found the right page Which is here: https://xen-orchestra.com/docs/users.html#self-service-portal

I'm not aware of any kind of limitation on naming the VM, because it's just a name label. However, you can force the creation of a tag for all VMs created by a specific self service resource set. Note that a VM name is just a label, it's not the "hostname" inside the VM itself, which is a different thing.

davx8342

@olivierlambert Ah, good spot on the doc, thank you!

Regarding the 'name'.

As you say there are two different things. There's the 'name' field which the user fills out and the 'hostname'.

I would like to enforce the hostname. I have Windows VMs and I need to make sure there are no name space collisions when they're domain joined.

VRA and a few other VM self service portals allow you to create a policy specifying the hostname of any deployed VMs.

olivierlambert

So you are using Cloudinit with your Windows VM to pass the hostname, right?

davx8342

@olivierlambert Yes. Using Cloudbase-init.

I'd like to use something like -

hostname: uk-xcp-{something}

Where {something} is a number that XO keeps track of per group so that for a new VM {something} is unique.