In case you didn’t notice, the new version of vCloud Usage Meter has been released at the end of July and is available for download. Read on to learn more about this new release.
vCloud
Bulk destroy virtual machines in VMware vCAC 6.0
During my current project where I’m implementing vCloud Automation Center as a multi-tenant, private cloud solution, I came across a lot of challenges. One of these challenges was the fact that it didn’t seem possible to bulk destroy virtual machines. This post clarifies how this can be done and what the requirements are.
VMware releases vCAC 6 and vCOPS 5.8
This evening, finally, Twitter feeds have gone wild about VMware vCloud Automation Center 6! Next, VMware also released vCenter Operations Manager 5.8.
Things to keep in mind when replacing #VMware #vSphere certificates
Some time ago, I replaced the SSL certificates in our test environment with the SSL Certificate Automation Tool. Everything went well, but some of the applications we were using or evaluating stopped working. This post will hopefully help you prevent applications to stop working after you replace the certificates in your environments.
VMworld 2013: How to Build Public and Private Cloud Services with VMware Technologies #PHC6064
Ok, I’m going to be honest because I feel I have to.
I expected a lot about this session and learn some new things or get some new ideas to implement in my deployed vCloud Director environment. Actually I didn’t learn anything because the speakers from OVH.com were not to be understood, at all. Only seeing their slides didn’t make up for this bad presentation. This is my opinion, maybe other people liked the session, but seen the fact that about 30-40 people walked away, I don’t think that’s the case.
The presentation was mostly about their cloud solution and that they have used vCloud Director to serve their customers. They automated a lot and deliver vSphere as a Service.
Because I didn’t want to be all negative, I stayed untill the session was over and went to them to ask something about my vCloud Director environment. They did tell me how they configured their environment to help me and that is something positive. I will fill in the survey for this session and hopefully these guys will be back next year with a better English tongue =)
VMworld 2013: General Session #GS-MON
This morning Robin Mattlock opened the General Session at the Moscone Centre-North with an awesome intro movie and prepared everyone for the Software Defined Data Center topics coming up the rest of the event.
She welcomed some ‘Alumni Elites’ on stage, persons who participated all VMworld events, for 10 years.
Robin mentioned that the number of VMs managed by an admin has been tripled when looking at the following ‘virtualization phases’:
- Compute virtualization (120 VMs managed per admin)
- Virtualizing Business Critical Applications (BCA) (170 VMs managed per admin)
- IT-as-a-Service (350+ VMs managed per admin)
Soon after Pat Gelsinger took stage and announced that everything has to be virtualized and VMware will never stop chasing the vision of virtualizing all apps, including the Business Critical Apps mentioned earlier.
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- Pat Gelsinger announcing vSphere and vCloud Suite 5.5
Next, Pat announced the release of vSphere and vCloud Suite 5.5 introducing support for large datastores and bigger virtual disks (64TB!), overall capabilities and application-aware High Availability.
VMware Virtual SAN is finally coming to GA as is VMware NSX which was announced by Martin Casado. I really have to show the features and capabilities provided by NSX to my networking colleagues, they will be flabbergasted! Most features you know of usual Virtual Machines like snapshotting and cloning will be made available to the networking aspects.
Ebay, Citi and GE Appliances came on stage telling their experiences with NSX and how they have (completely or partly). That proves that the technology is production capable.
They told us that no physical changes were needed in the infrastructure which sounds promising to me but I think more is needed to completely transform your networking infrastructure to a full virtualized infrastructure.
The last announcement I want to write about is VMware vCloud Hybrid Service, the public cloud solution provided by VMware and providing customers with an extension or even a replacement of their own datacenter. Solutions like Disaster Recovery as a Service can be provided easily and saves customers the need and costs for building their own failover site.
Pat states that VMware is the number one VMware Cloud Management provider and the fastest growing provider as well.
From what I can tell now, last year, VMworld 2012 was all about providing SDDC (Software Defined Data Center) services for Virtual Machines and now the next step has arrived for storage, networking and automation.
Thanks for reading!
vCloud Director Design 0.3
Good morning everyone,
While implementing my first vCloud Director environment for testing purposes, I have created a high level design that I would like to share with the community. Hopefully this will help people understand some of the ways you can use vCloud Director to provide cloud functionality to your datacenter.
Currently my design is at version 0.3. If there would be any major adjustments, I will publish a new blog posting.
The first drawing shows the way vCloud Director uses a management cluster for the vCloud management VMs and have a separate resource cluster to deploy your VDC (Virtual Data Center) in. Next it shows how authentication is flexible for each organization you create and assign resources according to the needs of your customers.
The drawing below shows the communication lines from vApp inside vCloud Director to the physical networks you might have.
Internal organization traffic will be transported over the VXLAN network. The VXLAN network is, in my situation, VLAN25 and is transporting more then one organization. Because VXLAN adds extra information to the VLAN packet, it will not be possible to communicate between organizations without passing through the vCloud Edge.
Addresses used on the internal and external NICs do not have to be unique inside your infrastructure, because all of that traffic is VXLAN traffic. Communication to the external networks will always happen using the physical IP address(es) you assign to the vCloud Edge. The example I always give here is: “You have a customer that wants to move his virtual infrastructure to your vCloud environment. The customer has his own IP subnets and does not want to re-number all of his VMs. Because only IP addresses inside an VDC have to be unique, the customer can keep using his own IP addresses and use the NAT functionality of the vCloud Edge to provide physical network ‘talk’.”
External traffic also flows thru the vCloud Edge and gets NAT’ed to an IP address on the physical network and is therefor routable to the corporate network or the internet (and backwards).
SnowVM 