I have started to create this page to collate the number of growing vCloud PowerCLI scripts available. It is designed to make it easy for you to find the scripts you are looking for. If you have any scripts published on your blogs or know of any useful scripts, please leave a comment and I will add it to the list. vCloud PowerCLI scripts list Show-vCloudStats Timo Sugliani vCheck for vCloud Director Alan Renouf Install software in Isolated Machines Aidan Dalgleish Retrieving vCloud Director VM Hard Disk size Alan Renouf Simple VM reporting in vCloud with PowerCLI Jake Robinson Setting default VDSwitch security for vCloud with PowerCLI Jake Robinson Youtube – vCloud Director PowerCLI basic usage VMwareTV
Affected by the Allocation Pool changes in VCD 5.1.x? Change it back
Have you been affected by the Allocation Pool changes in VCD 5.1 when you upgraded? If you have been, and are looking for a way to make this allocation model the same as in VCD 1.5, VMware has included a feature in VCD 5.1.2 that allows you to change it back to the original way it was conceived. First lets look at the changes in the Allocation Pool. Massimo ReFerre has written a great article showing the differences between the two versions of the allocation model http://it20.info/2012/10/vcloud-director-5-1-1-changes-in-resource-entitlements/ In this article he provides a comparison chart for you to easily see the differences, and gives a nice review of allocation models at the end of the article. OK but what does all this mean for me? As I am sure you are more confused than when you started reading this post… perhaps it makes sense to put a stake in the ground and underline advantages and disadvantages of the three models with vCloud Director 5.1. The PAYG model is the most simplistic of the three. This model allows the tenant to scale without pre-configured limits. It does also allow cloud consumers to scale without any contractual agreement on resources. Sophisticated capping mechanisms now allows
Read More…
Peer not authenticated error in vCloud Director
Some of my colleagues and I have been presenting a vCloud training session today, and one of the students got the error “Peer not Authenticated” when deploying a vApp. To diagnose the problem, first we need to turn on debugging in vCloud Director. We do this by following the steps below: Select System Click the Administration Button Select General Enable the checkbox next to “Display Debug Information” Peer not Authenticated debug information Going back and looking at the error we see a lot more information. Now looking at this error you can see that it is an issue with SSL. This error can be resolved by disabling the checking of vCenter and vShield certificates. To do this follow the steps below: Select System Click the Administration Button Select General Scroll down until you see Certificates Remove the ticks from the checkboxes for “Verify vCenter and vSphere SSO certificates” and “Verify vShield Manager certficates” Click Apply Now if you retry the task everything will work as expected.
vCloud Director and SE Sparse Disks
So the other day, a bunch of us were asked the question: “A customer of ours has asked if the partial writes issue with linked clones that was found in View and fixed in 5.2 with SE sparse disks has also been fixed in vCloud Director Fast Provisioning with SE sparse disks” Cormac Hogan wrote a really great article on SE Sparse Disks, which can be read by clicking here. This is possibly the most exciting new storage feature in the vSphere 5.1 release. Space Efficient Sparse Virtual Disks (or SE Sparse Disks for short) were designed to alleviate two issues. Let’s describe these issues first of all. Problem Statement #1 – Let’s take a Guest OS running on a linked clone (View desktop if you will), and this Guest OS issues a 4KB write. vmfsSparse disk (which is the format used by traditional linked clones) has a block allocation unit size of 512 bytes. In other words, this Guest OS is backed by 512 byte blocks. Depending on the applications deployed in the Guest OS, a worst case scenario is that these 512 byte blocks may not be contiguous on the VMDK, and thus may not be contiguous on
Read More…
vCloud Disaster Recovery White paper published
Alan Renouf and Aidan Dalgleish have written a white paper on how to automate the failover of your vCloud environment. This case study is a really interesting read, with some really cool concepts in it. Definite recommended reading for anyone looking to automate the disaster recovery of there vCloud infrastructure and provide business continuity. Click here to read the whitepaper VMware vCloud Director® enables enterprise organizations to build secure private clouds that dramatically increase datacenter efficiency and business agility. Coupled with VMware vSphere®, vCloud Director delivers cloud computing for existing datacenters by pooling vSphere virtual resources and delivering them to users as catalog-based services. It helps users build agile infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud environments that greatly accelerate the time to market for applications and the responsiveness of IT organizations. Resiliency is a key aspect of any infrastructure, it is even more important in IaaS solutions. This technical paper was developed to provide additional insight and information regarding the use of VMware vSphere PowerCLI™ to automate the recovery of a vCloud Director–based infrastructure. In particular, it focuses on automation of the recovery steps for vCloud Director 1.5–managed VMware vSphere vApp™ workloads. The recovery of management components can be achieved using VMware® vCenter™
Read More…
