Mastering CloudForms Automation

Chapter 26. Virtual Machine Provisioning Objects

When we write our own automation scripts to interact with the virtual machine provisioning workflow, we need to know how to locate the useful service model objects that are involved in the process. We might, for example, wish to determine the virtual machine operating system being provisioned, so that we can decide whether or not to register the new VM with a Red Hat Satellite server. Our experience up to now tells us that this is likely to be a service model attribute, but which one?

This chapter will examine the main service model objects that are involved in the virtual machine provisioning workflow, and how and why we access them.

Object Overview

There are several service model objects involved in the virtual machine or instance provisioning process, but we generally only work with four of them when we write our own Automate methods to interact with the provisioning workflow (see Figure 26-1).

Figure 26-1. VM provisioning objects

The Provision Request Object

We’ve discussed the provision request object in detail already. It is the object that contains all of the information relating to the virtual machine provisioning request.

Request Context

When working at the request stage of the provisioning process (i.e., prior to approval), we can access the provision request object directly from our workspace:

$evm.root['miq_provision_request' ...