During VMworld Chris Colotti and I presented quite a few group discussions on VMware vCloud.  During these discussions some people were amazed to find out how many components/products are involved in making up the vCloud environment.  When planning on building a VMware vCloud, you are not just installing vCloud Director and pointing it to vSphere, you are designing/building a whole Ecosystem. The list below shows which components are used in building a full vCloud environment.  They are listed in order of priority. vSphere ESXi vCenter vCloud Director vShield Manager vCenter Chargeback Vcenter Update Manager vCenter Orchestrator vCloud Service Manager vCloud Connector So why are these components important?  When designing a vCloud environment, you need to take into consideration the availability of certain components, like vCenter for example.  This is no longer a management tool that is used to manage your virtual infrastructure.  This is a critical component of your vCloud environment passing through all the operational commands a consumer initiates using vCloud Director.  How do you protect vCenter? There are 6 databases in a vCloud Ecosystem.  How do you protect all the databases?  Every component shown above with the exception of ESXi and vCloud Connector have a database that have

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I discovered today building a new vCD 1.5 home lab, that once you configure the System LDAP, you dont have the option to add any LDAP groups. This confused me, it was possible to do this in 1.0.x. Why isn’t it available in 1.5? What I discovered is that the GUI is still configured for non LDAP authentication. Once you have configured LDAP and started the synchronization log out of the vCloud Director GUI and back in. You will then see that groups is listed under the administration tab. The GUI needs to update its configuration options. Simple solution, but still confusing until you realise.

A few of my colleagues have been working on this recently, and the process has been released on some of the communities forums.  I thought I would share this process to help people re-build there dev environments and labs. This process documents how to wipe and re-install vCD, with the same version number. 1.    Export vApp Templates and any other vApps that are required in the re-built environment from the existing environment. 2.    Remove the VMware vCloud Director Configuration Components such as Virtual Datacenters, Organizations, vApps, VMs, Networks Pools and so on– manually. 3.    Cleanup the External Networks. 4.    Verify that all organization / vApp network portgroups are removed from the vSwitches/dvSwitches. You will still need the portgroups provisioned for the External Networks. 5.    Cleanup all the Resource group datastores. 6.    Unprepare the ESX/ESXi Hosts from the VMware vCloud Director web console. 7.    Verify on the ESX/ESXi Hosts that the VMware vCloud Director agents are removed and remove the agents manually if necessary •    Access tech support mode for ESXi or Service Console for ESX •    if /opt/vmware/vslad is present, the host is not unprepared properly •    in that case run the vslad uninstall script (/opt/vmware/uninstallers/vslad-uninstall.sh) •    If running

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This feature was also in 1.0.x, but I discovered at VMworld that not everyone knew about the Uber Admin menu within vCloud Director. To open the Uber Admin menu, login to your vCD cell, Click About in the Support pane on the right, then hold CTRL + SHIFT and press U.  This will open the Uber Admin menu as shown below. This allows you to set a few advanced options for display within vCloud Director.