vRAC Security Groups revisited

This is follow up to the previous article. A co-worker of mine came up with a better and much cleaner solution.

My original solution worked, but introduced a nasty deployment topology diagram.  In effect it showed every SG as attached, even unused ones. This diagram is very misleading and doesn’t reflect the actual assignment of the Security Groups.

The new solution is much cleaner and more closely represents what the user actually requested.  Here the two mandatory SG’s as well as the required role SG are attached.

The new conceptual code seemed logical, but vRAC just didn’t like it.

formatVersion: 1
inputs:
  extraSG:
    type: string
    title: Select extra SG
    default: nsx:compute_web_sg
    oneOf:
      - title: web
        const: nsx:compute_web_sg
      - title: app
        const: nsx:compute_app_sg
      - title: db
        const: nsx:compute_db_sg
resources:
  ROLE_SG:
    type: Cloud.SecurityGroup
    properties:
      constraints:
        - tag: '${input.extraSG}'
      securityGroupType: existing
  Cloud_Machine_1:
    type: Cloud.Machine
    properties:
      image: RHEL 8 - Encrypted EBS
      flavor: generic.small
      networks:
        - network: '${resource.Cloud_Network_1.id}'
          assignPublicIpAddress: false
          securityGroups:
            - '${resource.ROLE_SG.id}'

After some tinkering I came up the following blueprint.

formatVersion: 1
inputs:
  nsxNetwork:
    type: string
    default: compute
    enum:
      - compute
      - transit
  extraSG:
    type: string
    title: Select extra SG
    default: web
    enum:
      - web
      - app
      - db
resources:
  ROLE_SG:
    type: Cloud.SecurityGroup
    properties:
      name: '${input.extraSG + ''_sg''}'
      constraints:
        - tag: '${''nsx:'' + input.nsxNetwork + ''_'' + input.extraSG + ''_sg''}'
      securityGroupType: existing
  vmOverlay:
    type: Cloud.SecurityGroup
    properties:
      name: NSX Overlay
      constraints:
        - tag: 'nsx:vm-overlay-sg'
      securityGroupType: existing
  WebDMZ:
    type: Cloud.SecurityGroup
    properties:
      name: WebDMZ
      constraints:
        - tag: 'nsx:compute_webdmz'
      securityGroupType: existing
  Cloud_Machine_1:
    type: Cloud.Machine
    properties:
      remoteAccess:
        authentication: keyPairName
        keyPair: id-rsa 
      image: RHEL 8 - Encrypted EBS
      flavor: generic.small
      constraints:
        - tag: 'cloud_type:public'
      tags:
        - key: nsxcloud
          value: trans_ssh
      networks:
        - network: '${resource.Cloud_Network_1.id}'
          assignPublicIpAddress: false
          securityGroups:
            - '${resource.WebDMZ.id}'
            # Adding for NSX Cloud
            - '${resource.vmOverlay.id}'
            # if input.extraSG = "web" then WEB_SG else if imput.extraSG = "app" then APP_DB else DB_SG
            # - '${input.extraSG == "web" ? resource.WEB_SG.id : input.extraSG == "app" ? resource.APP_SG.id : resource.DB_SG.id}'
            - '${resource.ROLE_SG.id}'
  Cloud_Network_1:
    type: Cloud.Network
    properties:
      networkType: existing
      constraints:
        - tag: 'nsx:cloud_compute'

As you can see, there is more than one way to solve use cases with vRAC.  The key sometimes is just to keep trying different options to get the results you want.

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