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Groups

To customize a newly instantiated cloud for an individual customer, the first thing to do is to create a Group, which can be found under System -> Groups. Groups are the tenancy construct that ties Users to the pools of resources that they can provision. They also let you manage the user experience for those interacting with the HyperCloud.

Creating Groups

To create a Group, simply click through the sidebar menu of Systems and then Groups, then press the green + button.

From here, you will need to supply a few pieces of information:

  • Group Name
  • The type of view to be seen by the inhabitants of the group, either User or Administrator.

Info

  • The Cloud Layout provides a relatively locked-down environment, representing the simplest way to give users a cloud-like experience. They'll be able to provision the resources that are made available to them, but won't be able to view anything related to the infrastructure.
  • The Advanced Layout provides additional manageability of infrastructure components and the administrative layout selection provides the ability to interact with lower-level resources.

Danger

This level of control (Advanced Layout) is not something that should be provided to tenants.

  • An Administrator can be created if desired. Although not required, it can be useful to have a super-user (a user with elevated authority) within a Group. For example, the Administrator could create additional Users in the Group and manage Group permissions.
  • Permissions for resource creation can be set on this tab. This allows the IT Operations team control over resource usage while maintaining freedom of the Users to provision what they need.
  • Default system behavior of Images can be assigned
    • If you select the option to make new Images persistent, this will break the clone relationship with the base image and will consume the entire space as advertised in the Image definition.

Note

All Groups are added to the default Virtual Data Center. A VDC is a hierarchical domain which contains allotted combinations of Clusters, Hosts, Virtual Networks, and Datastores.

Clusters are a container for Hosts, Virtual Networks, and Datastores; by default, all HyperCloud constructs listed prior, are added to the Default cluster, and the Default cluster resides in the default Virtual Data Center.

Create Group

Deleting Groups

Within HyperCloud, there is a hierarchy of access and dependencies. The different parts of the system rely on this hierarchy to restrict bleed-over of resources and visibility of the infrastructure to those not allowed or required to manage it. For this reason, if a Group is no longer needed, it must be void of all attachments before deletion.

This means that:

  • any Users that are assigned to the Group and
  • any devices owned or managed by the Group (e.g. VMs, Templates), etc.

must be removed from the Group's supervision.