[Users] Automating the manual labour between us admins and our potential customers (orderportal)

[Karli Sjöberg]

Hi everyone!

Here´s a little something I´ve been tinkering on for some time now; the oVirt orderportal!

I had the idea that if you somehow could get users to order resources and give them the ability to, for themselves, take care of their VM´s lifecycle without ever having to involve us then that´s what I´d call a win-win situation; they get VM´s and we don´t have to lift a finger while cashing in on the profits;) While you could just give everyone a quota and let them install VM's on their own, those installation would most likely lack some of the extra quality that we as experts can provide, like to make sure they are domain connected, are automatically updated and so on.

The basic idea is to have, first of all, a domain (in our case it´s MS Active Directory) where all of your customers are stored so that they are able to just use their regular accounts when ordering and administering their resources, and a mail-server that can send the confirmations out directly to them. Then it´s our job as admins to fix up some templates so that it´s possible to spin up new VM's fast and effortlessly enough. Another one of the things that enables this solution is to have dynamic DNS activated on the network where these VM's are located so that they can just be called something, e.g. based on their MAC address, like we do. That way, you are able to anticipate what their domain name is going to be. You then register an alias for that domain name with the alias name of whatever the customer wanted it to be called. Create a domain user that you use to connect all of these VM´s to the domain when the template machines start up, so that your customers can log in to their VM's with their regular domain accounts. And create a role in oVirt that you assign to this manager that is only permitted to do what it´s supposed to be doing, and nothing else; create VM, take snapshot, assign permissions, etc.

What´s needed to get up and running with all of this?
- A LOT!:S Thing is, I´ve done this so that it basically just "works for us"™, and not much done about making the code dynamic or flexible so you´re going to have to dig in and mod all of the config files so that it fits your situation accordingly. But I thought that since the basic grunt work is done, I might as well share it so that if anyone else gets the same idea, they won´t have to invent the entire wheel all over again, they´ll just have to make my wheel fit into their car:)

Anyone who decides they´d like a shot at this, I´ll be more than happy helping with any questions you might have.

Big thanks to you developers, who gave me directions about how to use the PythonSDK! I´d also like to give my warmest thanks to the guys at paperboardinc, especially Ning, who helped fixing up the authentication popup. Having an orderportal without an authentication would have been waaay to naive for anyone to stomach:)

Screenshots are attached.

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Med Vänliga Hälsningar
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Karli Sjöberg
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Box 7079 (Visiting Address Kronåsvägen 8)
S-750 07 Uppsala, Sweden
Phone:  +46-(0)18-67 15 66
karli.sjoberg at slu.se<mailto:karli.sjoberg at adm.slu.se>
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