Another year another VMworld. It is a crazy ride working for VMware. I have just returned from PTO to the news that one of my sessions has been accepted. AWESOME news. This is a similar session to the one Duncan Epping and I presented at PEX. Session: VSP1168 – Architecting a Cloud Infrastructure Presenters: David Hill, Chris Colotti, and Aidan Dalgleish Abstract: This session will discuss the various design considerations when architecting the foundation for every solid cloud environment: vSphere 5.0. We will start with sizing and scaling and end with some operational guidance. Different examples will be used to show the impact design considerations can have on the availability of your services. I hope to see you all there, it will be another awesome week. I will write a follow up article on the sessions I think are must see from a vCloud perspective.
vCloud Connector Firewall ports
I have been trying to export some VMs from my home lab to my public cloud provider, however when I tried to select a cloud I received the error that the vCloud Connector Node was not available. After logging into the vCloud Connector server, I could see both nodes were down. I had enabled the firewall on both my public clouds yesterday, so I realised I had blocked the ports that the vCloud Connector Node uses to talk to the vCC server and other nodes. So I wondered which ports needed to be enabled. Reading through the vCloud Installation and Configuration guide for vCC 1.5.0 there is a great diagram on page 37 that explains the end to end data flow. As you can see by the diagram above the vCloud Connector Nodes talk on port 8443. You need to open this port at both sides, your private cloud and your public cloud. Using my public cloud provider portal I enabled the required port and pointed to the internal IP of the vCC node. After logging into the vCloud Connector server and refreshing the page I can now see that my public cloud nodes are both up and available again.
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PowerCLI 5.0.1 Released with vCloud Director Automation
A couple of days ago PowerCLI 5.0.1 was released. I am quite excited about this release, it contains Powershell Cmdlets for managing VMware vCloud Director. You can now use the following cmdlets in conjunction with vCloud Director Name Synopsis Connect-CIServer Connects to the specified servers. Disconnect-CIServer Disconnects from the specified cloud servers. Get-Catalog Retrieves the specified cloud catalogs. Get-CIRole Retrieves roles in the cloud. Get-CIUser Gets cloud users. Get-CIVApp Retrieves virtual appliances in the cloud. Get-CIVAppTemplate Retrieves virtual appliance templates. Get-CIView Returns cloud views by Id. Get-CIVM Retrieves the virtual machines on the cloud. Get-ExternalNetwork Retrieves cloud external networks. Get-Media Retrieves cloud medias. Get-Org Gets cloud organizations. Get-OrgNetwork Retrieves cloud organization networks. Get-OrgVdc Retrieves organization VDCs. Get-ProviderVdc Retrieves the specified cloud provider VDCs. Import-CIVApp Imports a virtual machine from vSphere to a cloud. Import-CIVAppTemplate Imports a virtual machine or an OVF package from a vSphere server to the vCloud as a virtual appliance template. Search-Cloud Searches the cloud for objects of the specified type. To download PowerCLI 5.0.1 click here Further information can be found by clicking here or visit virtu-al.net
How to enable Elastic Virtual DataCenters in vCloud Director
I have been playing around with my home lab today, and trying to work out how to enable Elastic Virtual Data Centers within vCloud Director. First of all, what is an Elastic vDC you ask? An Elastic vDC allows you to add more resources to a Provider vDC when they become consumed/constrained. Why would you need to do this? Well first off this only works with the Pay-as-you-go Allocation model. Pay-as-you-go is exactly that, you have no idea as a provider on how many VMs will be deployed. Potentially there is the possibility that all your resources will be consumed, and your consumers will not be able to deploy any more workloads. This is where Elastic vDCs come in, you can add more resources to a PvDC on the fly. So how do we do it? Log in to vCD as a system admin Click the “Manage & Monitor” button Expand “Provider vDCs” Highlight the PvDC you want to expand, right click and select “Open” Navigate to the far right tab “Resource Pools”, this will show the mapped resource pool for that PvDC. Right Click and Select “Add Resource Pool”. You will be presented with a window showing available Resource
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vCloud Ecosystem components explained
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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