Exercise 1.1 - Explore Your First Infrastructure Provider

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Exercise 1.1: Working with Infrastructure Providers

Exercise Description

Learn to view, search and manage infrastructure providers, in Red Hat CloudForms.

In Red Hat CloudForms, an infrastructure provider is a virtual infrastructure environment that you can add to a Red Hat CloudForms appliance, to manage and interact with the resources, in that environment.

In other words, a infrastructure provider is a management platform for managing virtual machines from a single type of hypervisor. Infrastructure providers supported by CloudForms are Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Management (RHEV-M), VMware vCenter and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).

Section 1: Explore Infrastructure Providers

Step 1: Select ComputeInfrastructureProviders.


Infrastructure Providers

Step 2: view the list of your data center infrastructure providers, such as VMware vCenter and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.

Section 2: Discover Infrastructure Providers

In very large environments, you can discover new infrastructure providers.

Step 1: Click (Configuration), then click (Discover).



Discover Infrastructure Providers

Review the data entry screen, but do not enter any information.

Step 2: Click Cancel to return to the previous screen.



Cancel Discover Infrastructure Providers

Section 3: Add Infrastructure Providers

You can also add infrastructure providers, if known.

Step 1: Click (Configuration), then click (Add).


Add Infrastructure Providers

Step 2: Review the data entry screen, but do not enter any information.

Step 3: Click Cancel to return to the previous screen.


Cancel Add Infrastructure Providers

Section 4: Explore the Virtual Thumbnail for Infrastructure Providers

The web interface uses virtual thumbnails to represent providers. Each thumbnail contains four quadrants by default, which displays basic information about each provider.


Example Virtual Thumbnail

  1. Number of hosts
  2. Management system software
  3. Currently unused
  4. Authentication status

In the Virtual Thumbnail below, note the . This demo is disconnected from the providers, so if you ever encounter the exclamation point, it indicates the status as not connected.


Disconnected Virtual Thumbnail

When connected to providers, such as in a actual deployment, the is replaced with a .

A (Policy) in the center of the virtual thumbnail indicates that this provider has one or more policies applied. There are no policies configured in this exercise, so the shield does not appear.

Step 1: Toggle views

In the top right corner of the window, click to toggle between Grid, Tile, and List views.


Top Window Navigation Infrastructure Providers

Step 2: Access provider lists

Click (Download) for a list of providers in TXT, CSV, or PDF formats.


Download Infrastructure Providers

Step 3: View provider details

Click any infrastructure provider and observe the following details on the resulting screen:


Infrastructure Providers Dashboard

  1. The Properties section lists the aggregate host resources for the provider.
  2. CloudForms can communicate with the provider in the Authentication Status section.
  3. The Relationships section lists related clusters, hosts, datastores, VMs, and templates for this provider.
  1. The Smart Management section shows if this provider has any smart tags applied. You learn more about smart tagging later in the lab.

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