Virtual Blog - Tag Archive for "networking"

VMware NSX Network Virtualization announced – My take

Published on March 13, 2013 by David Hill in VMware Posts

Today VMware has announced the new network virtualization product VMware NSX. How cool is that name by the way? Now normally I dont write articles on the new products we announce (excluding vCloud Director related), but if anyone watched my Chinwag with Mike Laverick, I find this one of particular interest. My personal opinion is that this is the next major wave of virtualization, and VMware is at the forefront of the technology again. Back in the day when I was a Windows NT 3rd Line Engineer, I got involved in networking a lot more, even passing my CCNA (dont ask me a single question about it, I have forgotten more than I learnt) but I have always found the networking side of the datacenter infrastructure interesting. Now I am no Kamau Wanguhu, but I know a thing or two about networking, so this technology for me is of awesome interest. Anyway, enough about me and my opinions (read more below), the full VMware NSX Network Virtualization announcement can be found by clicking here. A quick snippet from the article: Networking is stuck in the past It wasn’t that long ago when provisioning server resources for an application was manual,

Tags: networking, virtualization, VMware, VSX

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VMware vCloud Director 101 – Networking – Part 4

Published on March 7, 2012 by David Hill in Cloud Computing, Featured

This is part 4 of the vCloud Director 101 posts I have recently been writing. This article covers the vCloud Director Networking concepts and how they fit together. You can read the previous posts by clicking here. To understand some of the terms contained within this post, you need to read the first post that discuses the terms “consumers” and “providers”. We will be using these terms regularly throughout this article. vCloud Director network layers We will start by discussing the three different networking layers. These are: External Networks Organization Networks vApp Networks These networks are managed at two different layers: Consumers and Providers. External Networks and Organization Networks are created and managed by the Cloud Admins or Providers, where as vApp Networks are created and managed by the users or consumers of vCloud Director. So what is an External Network? A Network that is external to VMware vCloud Director It is created in vSphere It provides external connectivity to Organizations It maps to a port group at the VMware vSphere layer The port group is attached to VMware vCloud Director as an “External Network” External Networks allow the vCloud to connect to the outside world. These are exactly as

Tags: 101, basics, concepts, networking, vcloud, vcloud director

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vCloud Ecosystem components explained

Published on October 25, 2011 by David Hill in Cloud Computing

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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Cannot add groups to vCD after configuring LDAP

Published on October 12, 2011 by David Hill in Cloud Computing

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.

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How-To: Re-install VMware vCloud Director

Published on September 27, 2011 by David Hill in Cloud Computing

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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