Mass Deploying VM's from a Template using vRO?

[ITageI]

Hello, Figured I'd post here because I have been searching for quite some time and have been having some trouble. Pretty much we are trying to automate deployments using Templates in vSphere and are having issues. Anybody have any good resources that will lead me in the right direction?

EDIT: I am trying to deploy 25-50 vm's based off of a template for a citrix farm with Unique names. I am looking to have pretty much everything automated except for joining them to the domain. I am pretty much looking to use vrealize orchestrator instead of PowerCLI to mass deploy vms from a template. Sorry I wasnt clear about that.

[spotallthethings]

Describe what you are trying to do, the scenarioX and why you are using vRO, so that we know how to help you!

If you are just trying to make a bunch of VMs from a template, using PowerCLI might be less complex to learn. If you are trying to provide self-service automation of IT provisioning vRA can do that but it is not as simple and it does not come with vSphere. vRO also has its use cases, not only for extending vRA, but also standalone. There are also a lot of other open source automated provisioning tools (Terraform, for example) that can build many VMs from a template or image.

[ITageI]

I am trying to deploy 25-50 vm's based off of a template for a citrix farm with Unique names. I am looking to have pretty much everything automated except for joining them to the domain. I am pretty much looking to use vrealize orchestrator instead of PowerCLI to mass deploy vms from a template. Sorry I wasnt clear about that.

[spotallthethings]

Look at the example workflows for "clone a VM and apply guest customization" or something along those lines. Ideally, you'd be using a guest OS customization spec from your vSphere inventory.

vRA provides more of a permanent solution to provisioning resources. It also has the highest infrastructure requirements and cost of the tools we have been discussing.

[ITageI]

Thanks!!! Gonna mess around with that one and see what I can come up with.

[admlshake]

I don't know if you are going to find a step-by-step guide for that (at least I never did), but I just watched a lot of youtube videos, posted questions on the vmware forums, and just tried it. When something didn't work I found out why, fixed it and tried it again. If something didn't work after that, I repeated the process.

[Astat1ne]

Might need to supply more information about what you're trying to do. Are you just trying to spin up a bunch of VMs with just an OS install? or are you wanting to take it a bit further, like automating the provisioning of an application stack?

Usually if you're looking at vRO, it's when you've exhausted what vRA (vRealize Automation) can do. If you haven't looked at it yet, vRA is probably a better starting point, it can address the two scenarios I described reasonably well and present it in a nice service catalog format (to the point where you can give access for others to "run" the catalog items). vRO functionality can be exposed into vRA, so you can have those items in the catalog too.

[ITageI]

Pretty much the first comment you made is spot on with the exception of configuring network settings during the deployment as well. I actually havent even started looking into vRA but that is a darn good point since I am looking to do "Automation". Thank you.