Use > Providers > Environments

Environments

Environments are optional and provide a mechanism for grouping providers. The most common grouping patterns include grouping by geographical location, organizational structure, or production readiness. For example, you may want to group providers geographically and create environments such as East Coast or South America. Or you may want to group providers by their production readiness and create environments such as Production, Development, and Test.

In addition, environments can be linked to a service catalogs to support distribution of resource provisioning.

Resource environments can be used to restrict the set of resource providers that can be chosen at subscription time. When provider selection occurs during service provisioning, only providers belonging to one or more of the environments associated with the service catalog will be eligible for selection. If no environments are associated with a service catalog, provider selection is not restricted based on environment membership.

Note When you have resource environments associated with a catalog that contains service offerings that are created from topology designs, a subscriber option set is automatically created for the design and is called <Provider_Type_Display_Name> Environment and Provider Selection.

The new subscriber option set contains all environments associated with the catalog that contain enabled providers capable of provisioning the component types used in the design that are of the provider type specified in this option set. The option set also contains an option Any Environment that, if selected, indicates that providers in any environment may be selected.

All options except Any Environment contain a single List property (Providers) that includes the list of provider instances in the environment that are capable of provisioning the components used in the design that are of the provider type specified in this option set. The list also includes Any Provider In This Environment, which means that any provider in the selected environment can be selected.

Exposing provider selection to subscribers can be disabled if desired; for more information, see the "Cloud Service Management Console Properties" section in the Cloud Service Automation Configuration Guide.

Tasks

You can perform the following tasks in this area:

  • View providers by environment - In the drop-down box, select to view providers By Environment. Environments are listed in the left pane. The providers belonging to the selected environment are displayed in the right pane. Disabled providers are indicated by the Disabled label and will not be selected when provisioning new services.
  • Manage environments- In the drop-down box, select By Environment. Click the gear icon and select Manage Resource Environments. For more information, see Manage environments.
  • Select providers to include in an environment - In the drop-down box, select By Environment. Select the environment in which you want to include a provider. Click the gear icon and select Select. In the dialog box, add or remove resource providers to or from the environment. Tip: Use the drop-down box in the dialog to filter the resource provider list by provider type.

Note Locked items cannot be deleted.