Mastering CloudForms Automation

Chapter 9. Using Tags from Automate

Tags are a very powerful feature of CloudForms. They allow us to add Smart Management capabilities to the objects in the WebUI such as virtual machines, hosts, or clusters; to create tag-related filters; and to group, sort, or categorize items by tag.

For example, we might assign a tag to a virtual machine to identify which department or cost center owns the VM. We could then create a chargeback rate for billing purposes and assign the rate to all VMs tagged as being owned by a particular department or cost center.

We might also tag virtual machines with a Location or Data Center tag. We could create a filter view in the WebUI to display all VMs at a particular location so that we instantly can see which systems might be affected if we run a data center failover or power test.

Tags are not only applied to virtual machines. We often tag our virtual infrastructure components—such as hosts, clusters, or datastores—with a Provisioning Scope tag. When we provision new virtual machines, our Automate workflow must determine where to put the new VM (a process known as placement). We can use the Provisioning Scope tag to determine a best fit for a particular virtual machine, based on a user’s group membership. In this way we might, for example, place all virtual machines provisioned by users in a development group on a nonproduction cluster.

These are just three examples of how tags can simplify systems administration and help our Automate workflows. ...