This post is more for a reminder to myself. I am always forgetting where I need to mount the transfer LUN on vCloud Director cells. The transfer LUN is used for uploading and downloading, and can be NFS or other types of shared storage. It is only used for when you have more than one vCD cell. The location is /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer If anyone is interested in reading more about what the transfer mount is used for Jason Boche wrote a great article on it.
VMware vCloud Director 101 – Overview – Part 1
Quite a few people have been asking me to write this article for a while. vCloud Director has been around a while now, but it appears that it is only now gathering momentum and it is being looked at seriously. This multi-part article will cover all the basic concepts of vCloud Director and what the different terminology means. First of all, lets talk about what VMware vCloud Directors actual purpose is: A quote from the VMware vCloud Director page on VMware.com explains: Manage resources more efficiently by logically pooling infrastructure capacity into policy-based virtual datacenters. VMware vCloud Director integrates with existing VMware vSphere deployments and extends capabilities like Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and vNetwork Distributed Switch, to provide elastic compute, storage and networking interfaces across multiple clusters. Using virtual datacenters built on top of vSphere, VMware vCloud Director enable resources to be provisioned without the need for repeated configuration or significant maintenance. The way I like to explain vCloud Director is this way: vCloud Director is an abstraction layer, it allows anyone to come along and consume compute, memory, networking and storage resources without worrying about the underlying hardware or infrastructure. It enables that current buzz word Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Along
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vCloud Director PAY-AS-GO vCPU default setting – Gotcha
During Partner Exchange I had quite a few discussions with people about the default vCPU setting when creating an Org vDC with a Pay-As-You-Go allocation model. Now this is nothing new however this is still causing quite a few performance issues out in the field. When creating a new Org vDC through the wizard, after selecting the allocation model Pay-As-You-Go, you are shown the configure window. This window allows configure the compute requirements for this Org vDC. This is where the gotcha comes in. The default setting vCPU is configured at 0.26 Ghz. I will repeat this as I know I have missed it in the past. The default setting for vCPU is 0.26GHz. You can see in the screenshot below the default setting. So how does this actually relate to the objects in vCenter? By leaving this set to the default, this will configure every VM you create with a vCPU limit of 0.26GHz. The screenshot below shows the vCPU limit configured in vCenter. If you experience any performance issues running VMs from vCloud Director, it is always best to check the Org vDC vCPU settings in the first instance. To read an in-depth guide about vCloud Director Allocation models
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vCloud DR Solution – Partner opinions
Here is a video with some partners discussing the vCloud DR solution that was released last week.
VMware Chargeback Manager 2.0 released
I have just realised that VMware Chargeback 2.0 has been released. A quick point to note is that vCenter Chargeback is now known as Chargeback Manager. From a vCloud perspective, this is what we have all been waiting for. Chargeback Manager 2.0 provides support for all the features in vCloud Director 1.5 and vSphere 5.0. To read the full release notes click here This is some of the important features I think will interest people: Charge thin and thick provisioned virtual machines differently Tier based Storage costing Complete support for vSphere 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5 Support for overage charging for org vDCs in the Allocation Pool model of vCloud Director Support for burstable billing or 95th percentile billing for the external network traffic in vCloud Director New cost models and billing policies for vCloud Director Complete support for vSphere 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5
