Brand New Code: Brand New Community Resources
In addi on to the vendor-provided documenta on, almost as important as the official product
documenta on are the available community resources for a product. The community backing and
backlog of available resources for vRA7 is astounding, however vRA8 community ar cles are
beginning to catch up.
Many of the ar cles may refer to vRealize Automa on Cloud (vRAC), which is slightly more mature
due to its accelerated release cadence and may or may not apply to all use cases of the on-prem
vRA 8 product, e.g. tenancy and installa on.
Tagging, Custom Proper es, and Propaga on
With vRA 8 comes a new way to manage your machine metadata. In the new pla orm, there are
tags, capability tags, constraint tags, standard tags, project tags, project constraint tags, and
custom proper es. There is a bit of tag overload going on here. Some of these tags are used in
placement decisioning, some of them propagate from higher level objects and go on to set tags on
the endpoint itself, and some of them do not. According to the VMware documenta on, each of
the referenced tag types are defined as follows:
• Capability Tags: Enable you to define placement logic for deployment of infrastructure
components.
• Constraint tags: You add constraint tags to blueprints and various other components within
vRealize Automa on Cloud Assembly to match capabili es defined on resources, cloud
zones, and profiles to generate appropriate deployments.
• Standard tags: vRealize Automa on Cloud Assembly applies standard tags to some
deployments to support analysis, monitoring, and grouping of deployed resources. Note:
although these are documented, they cannot be found whether in the GUI or the API. The
overall intent behind them is unclear, or where they may actually be able to be referenced
since they are not readily accessible in either the API or the GUI.
• Project Resource Tags: A project resource tag operates as a standardized iden fying tag that
you can use to manage the deployed resources and ensure compliance.
• Project Constraint Tags: A project constraint operates as a governance defini on. It is a
key:value tag that defines what resources the deployment request consumes or avoids in
the project cloud zones.
A Change to Custom Proper es
In custom proper es are not like they were in vRA7. Custom proper es can s ll be applied to a
resource to specify metadata about that resource, but they are no ceably missing from
infrastructure endpoints, and appear to be limited in total func onality compared to vRA7.
The only tags/custom proper es/metadata that propagates down to deployed resources — such as
virtual machines — appear to be project resource tags and tags set on the resource itself in the
blueprint. We have worked with hundreds of customers who have realized simplified provisioning
by being able to set Custom Proper es directly where they were most applicable. Without the
capability to specify metadata on the endpoints (cluster, vCenter, storage, network, etc.) and to
have that metadata propagated during deployment, it can poten ally lead to increased blueprint
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