When deploying virtual machines the very first ask for customization is almost always “How do we change the machine name?” or “How do we implement our custom machine naming convention?”. It’s an essential part of a deployment and has to be something that is out-of-the-box! In this blog we are going to cover the custom host naming capability within Cloud Assembly which provides an easy way to implement that naming standard you need for your deployments.
Where Do I Create Custom Naming:
A project is a collection of users, resources, policies, and configurations that are applied to all deployments that are requested from its members. In Cloud Assembly you set custom host naming at a project level within the platform. Now you are ready to create a custom naming specification that can meet your company standards.
What Can I Do With Custom Naming:
Lots of customers have very “interesting” naming conventions, so we had to create a feature that would give you A LOT of flexibility to create a naming standard. As you can see from the above image we have made creating virtually any naming convention you could need using variables.
The Results Of Setting A Custom Name:
Using the available naming variables you can easily create a name which can meet your companies requirements. In the above example we used our email address and the prefix and a random set of numbers as the suffix for the naming convention.
As you can see the machine was created using the naming convention that was specified in the project in Cloud Assembly. Easy stuff!!!
Summary:
As you can see creating a custom host naming convention in Cloud Assembly is easy and provides a very flexible formatting so you can create virtually any naming standard you would need.
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The real question is how do you get it to go in a sequence, say you have TEST machine 01, and TEST Machine 02, and you want the next two to be TEST machine 03 and 04, how can you include that kind of logic?
So TEST01 & TEST02 exist, I want the next ones to be TEST03 & TEST04, or even adding a totally different name but I want the number to just reset on each unique name. ATEST01, whereas right now the naming would just put it as ATEST05 as the next one in the sequence.
When you add the #### to the end of the naming expression it will start with 0001 and then continue up from there