VCAP6-CMA (Beta) Objective 4.2 - Create / Configure an approval policy Part 02

This is the second part of Objective 4.2. You could find the Part 01 here, and in this part I would cover below sub-objectives

· Create / Configure an approval policy

· Create / Configure an approval policy

VMware documentation

A tenant administrator or business group manager can associate an approval policy with any service,
catalog item, or action as part of entitling the items or actions to users.
A tenant administrator or an approval administrator can create approval policies. Each approval policy has
an approval policy type that determines to what requests that policy can apply. For example, you can apply
some policies only to new catalog item requests, or requests for a specific type of item. You can apply other
policies only to post-provisioning actions or to a specific action on provisioned items.

For example, an approval policy can define the following phases:

01: A Pre-Provisioning approval phase must be complete before provisioning a requested item
02: A Post-Provisioning phase occurs after the item is already provisioned but before it is released to the owner

Now if we are looking for Approval policy at Pre-Provisioning phase, then it is the straight forward and goes for approval before provisioning starts, whereas Post-Provisioning phase gives some customization options like calling vRealize Orchestrator workflows to perform tasks and then goes for the Approval after the item is provisioned but before it is released to the owner. If this requested is rejected, then the provisioned item is destroyed.

1. Go to Administration > Approval policies

2. Click on Add and Select the Policy Type. Notice there are different policy type for different request & Resource Actions. For this task, I would select policy type as Catalog Item Request and click on OK. 

3. Give a appropriate name for Approval Policy and set the status to Active or leave it to draft till you complete 

Pre-Approval & Post-Approval with Levels options. You can have multiple levels and add different departments in respective levels. I will create a Pre-Approval Phase here

4. Click on green plus for first Level for Pre-Approval and update as per your requirement

Is manual approval required?

a. Always required
If you set this, Approval is needed for all the request.

b. Required based on Condition
You can define a scenario like

Define the Clause >> Approval is triggered if any one condition or all condition or exception are met.
Here I added a condition that any request from email owner "akmal@ps.local" has to go for approval.

you can keep adding more Approval expressions under this Clause definition.

Select the User or User Groups who would be the Approvers for this level.

Click on Add to save this. Again Click on Add to save this Approval Policy.

lets see any other scenario which is more appropriate to day to day use of cloud

1. I am creating a New Approval Policy for Catalog Item Request - Virtual Machine. Click on OK and proceed.

2. Enter the Name and set the status to Active or leave it to draft till you complete

3. Create a Pre-Approval Level

Notice the scenario where I have Clause for CPU, Memory and storage, if the requester exceeds any one value then the request goes for Approval.

Important: The options depends on the "Policy Type" you select.

Similarly, you can defined several scenarios depending on the Business Requirements.