Administration Guide › Provisioning Resources › Service Provisioning › How to Provision Services › Create Templates and Application Stacks

Create Templates and Application Stacks

Application stack provisioning is the creation of a working instance of an application stack that is based on a service template.

A service template is the set of applications with their associated actions and the machine definitions that are required to host the service. The service template is created by the admin that is a member of Service Administrators.

An application stack is created based on a service template. When the admin user creates a service template, a correspondent Application stack is created automatically by CA Server Automation. The service template is configured as part of the selected stack for the Service Administrators Organizational Unit.

Follow these steps:

1. Click Designer, and click the Create new template icon.
2. On the right hand side of the pane, select Properties and input a name and description for the service template.
3. (Optional) Specify a Template Information file.

   The Template Information file is used as a template to create the stack information based on the provisioned application stack instance. The HTML format file specifies the connection details that are required to access the service and any other information that is required to use the service. Stack Information is one of the menu items in the Actions menu on the Home page. .

   Note: For examples of template information files, review the service templates that are provided with CA Server Automation.

4. Select the Icon file and Extend Description file.

   Note: The default file location for the Icon file and Extend Description file is C:\CA\CloudManager\liferay-portal-tomcat\tomcat-6.0.29\webapps\SSRMImages

5. (Optional) Specify a semi-colon delimited list of Tags to organize templates into the Template category.
6. Click on the Package pane.
7. Drag and drop the target packages onto the canvas

   Note: To add the first application package to server 1, drag and drop the application to the canvas. To add the second application to the target server, click on the target server to highlight the server, and then drag and drop the second application to the target server.

8. Arrange the application execution order by using the Up or Down Arrows.
9. (Optional) If more than one application requires the same parameters, you can use global substitution variables instead of setting the parameter in each individual application. If multiple applications require the same database connection and credentials, you can create substitution variables specifying the default values. You can specify the substitution variable in the individual applications.
   1. Click on the canvas which brings the right hand pane to the Properties pane, and click Options to add global substitution variables on the Properties pane.
   2. In the Template Options dialog, enter a Description, Label, and Data Type for the variable.
   3. Enter a Default Value for the variable.

      Note: To maintain a set of values for the variable, click on + sign to add the value item to the value List.

   4. (Optional) Select User Editable to indicate that the end user can input a value for the action parameter during the execution of the application. Specify a Label as the prompt the end user receives when an input is required.
   5. (Optional) Select Mandatory to specify that a user input is required.
   6. Click OK.

      CA Server Automation adds the variable to the list of Options to the template.

   7. Expand the application package in the template on a specific server and select the application action. The right hand pane displays the options ( aka action parameters) of the Actions. Edit application action options in the template as required, replacing the Default Value for an action parameter with the substitution variable.
10. (Optional) Click on the Server in the canvas, the right hand side pane displays the properties of the server. Edit the configuration and requirements for the machines that are required to provision the service:

    Note: By default, Templates automatically apply VM template to any machines required for service provisioning. (Optional) Select a VMware vCenter Template to use.

    1. Specify the CPU and memory resources that are required for the machine.
    2. (Optional) Select a Dynamic Specification to use for VMware vCenter provisioning.
       Note: In the Cloud Manager1.0, the Dynamic Specification will need to be created from CLI. Please reference to dpmutil command to create Dynamic Specifications.
    3. Click the Disks tab to view the view and modify the disk storage configuration for a machine.
11. Click Save to save the template.

    CA Server Automation adds the template to the template list.

    Note: CA Server Automation automatically creates an application stack for provisioning.