It is important for Enterprise Administrators to understand which machines they can manage. The situa- tion is different in regard to virtual and cloud machines on the one hand and physical machines on the other.
Enterprise Virtual and Cloud Machines
Within vCAC, virtualization compute resources and cloud endpoints are independent of provisioning groups. Each Enterprise Administrator can manage only those compute resources and endpoints in her own enterprise groups, including creating reservations on them. But any Enterprise Administrator can assign a reservation to any provisioning group.
A provisioning group can have one or more reservations on any compute resource or endpoint, and any compute resource or endpoint can have reservations for one or more provisioning groups. The relation- ship between enterprise groups and provisioning groups varies accordingly.
Enterprise Administrators and PGMs manage different sets of virtual and cloud machines, performing different operations on them. A PGM manages all virtual and cloud machines provisioned within her pro- visioning groups, but an Enterprise Administrator manages virtual machines provisioned on compute resources in her enterprise groups and cloud machines provisioned on endpoints in her enterprise groups. Therefore the intersection between the set of virtual and cloud machines that a PGM manages and those an Enterprise Administrator manages depends on the reservation relationship between the enterprise groups and provisioning groups involved.
vCAC collects data from compute resources and endpoints on a regular basis, so its information about virtual and cloud machines provisioned on the compute resources and endpoints in each enterprise
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group is generally up to date. To make sure it is fully up to date, you can use the Data Collection option for an individual compute resource or endpoint.
Note: Data collection from virtualization compute resources detects unmanaged (pro- visioned outside vCAC) virtual machines on those compute resources, but data collection from cloud endpoints does not collect any information about cloud machines in the account that were not provisioned by vCAC.
Enterprise Physical Machines
The basis on which Enterprise Administrators manage physical machines is simpler—all Enterprise Administrators manage all physical machines available within the vCAC instance.
Each physical machine available for reservation and provisioning is associated with an endpoint. For physical machines, an endpoint consists of a specific address and credentials used to interact with a management interface. Once a vCAC administrator adds an endpoint, vCAC collects data about the machines it can discover using this information and updates that data at regular intervals.
Any Enterprise Administrator can create a physical reservation for any provisioning group, and at any time can add any unreserved machine to any reservation (a machine can be in only one reservation at a time) or move an unprovisioned machine between reservations or out of the reservation it is in. But all Enterprise Administrators can always manage all physical machines. This is shown in the following illus- tration.
All physical machines listed on the Enterprise Machines page are either unprovisioned, meaning the machine has been discovered but there is no vCAC database entry for an operating system on it, or
managed, meaning vCAC has a database entry for its OS and associated information.
When a physical machine is discovered by data collection from the endpoint representing it, it may or may not have an existing operating system. Both types of machine have a status of Reserved (if reserved for a provisioning group) or Unmanaged (if not reserved) and a machine name of Unknown
when added to vCAC.
An unmanaged machine becomes managed when it is reserved for a provisioning group and then
•
selected for a group member’s provisioning request•
provisioned by a PGM using the Provision option•
imported into vCAC by an EA or PGM or both using the Import option (machines with existing operating systems only)Machines provisioned by either method above receive vCAC-generated machine names (unless the Hostname property is used. Imported machines receive a name provided by the importing PGM. There- fore, each machine in the Enterprise Physical Machines list belongs to one of four categories, as shown in the following table.
Note: Except for Cisco UCS physical machines, it is not possible to distinguish between unprovisioned machines with and without operating systems within vCAC. Cisco UCS machines with an associated service profile can be imported but not provisioned; Cisco UCS machines with no associated service profile can be provisioned but not imported.
Table 6 Enterprise Physical Machine Categories
Caution: When an unprovisioned machine with an existing operating system is provi- sioned using the Provision option, the operating system is lost along with all associated data.
Because vCAC regularly collects data from endpoints, its information about physical machines associ- ated with all known endpoints is generally up to date. To make sure it is fully up to date, you can use the
Data Collection option for an individual endpoint.