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Category Archives: vCloud Director

How To Import An OVA Into vCloud Director?

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For those of you who have tried to import an OVA directly into vCloud Director have probably noticed that this is not supported and only an OVF file can be uploaded. However, it is possible to upload an OVA directly into vCloud Director, but it does require the use of another tool called the ovftool which is multi-platform command-line utility for OVF/OVA management. This article was motivated by a recent internal discussion and I thought I share this little tidbit in case it was not very well known.

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vCloud Director 5.1.2 Released

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I’d like to announce the general availability of VMware vCloud Director 5.1.2.  This update was released on April 25th, 2013.

This update provides:

  • Rights for creating, reverting and removing snapshots
  • Allocation pool organization virtual datacenters can be elastic or non-elastic
  • Support for RHEL 6.3
  • Support for Microsoft SQL Server 2012
  • Guest OS customization of Microsoft Windows Server 2012

Get the release notes from here.

Download the update from here.

Get notification of new blog postings and by following Kyle Gleed on Twitter: @Kyle_Gleed

VMware vCenter Server 5.1 Update 1 Released

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There have been some rumors but I can now officially share the update release 1 for vSphere vCenter Server 5.1.

vCenter Server 5.1 Update 1 | Build 1064983
vCenter Server Appliance 5.1 Update 1 | Build 1065184

Download from VMware.com

What’s New

This release of VMware vCenter Server 5.1 Update 1 offers the following improvements:

  • vCenter Server is now supported on Windows Server 2012
  • Additional vCenter Server Database Support: vCenter Server now supports the following databases.
    • Microsoft SQL Server 2012
    • Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2
  • Additional Guest Operating System Customization Support -vCenter Server now supports customization of the following guest operating systems:
    • Windows 8
    • Windows Server 2012
    • Ubuntu12.04
    • RHEL 5.9
  • vCenter Essentials no longer enforces vRAM usage limit of 192 GB
    With vSphere 5.1 Update 1, the Essentials and Essentials Plus licenses no longer restrict virtual machine power-on operations when the vRAM usage limit of 192 GB is met.
  • Resolved Issues – This release delivers a number of bug fixes that have been documented in the Resolved Issues section.

Click to review the complete VMware vSphere 5.1 Update 1 release notes

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The vCloud Suite Digest (March, 2013) with Pang Chen and Mike Laverick

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With thanks to many sources including: Michael Haines, Jesse Schachter, Zach Shepherd, Vegard Sagbakken, Trevor Gerdes, Michael Haines

Hello and welcome to the third vCloud Suite Digest, a compilation of common technical questions and answers on vCloud Suite architecture and implementation. Behind us is a legion of people a group of people far too numerous to mention (for us these are the unsung heroes of VMware) who provide definitive answers and guidance. People fixing problems on a daily basis, that don’t get half the spotlight that jumped up evangelists do. In this months edition we cover such topics as:

  • vCloud Director Database Encryption
  • vCloud Director Database Settings
  • vCloud Director and NFS Transfer Share
  • vCloud Director: Maximum Number of VMs
  • vCloud Director: Sticky Sessions
  • vCNS Edge Gateway: vNIC Maximum
  • vCNS Edge Gateway Load Balancing
  • vCloud Connector: Copying vApps from vCD 1.5 to 5.1

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New Whitepaper published–vCloud Disaster Infrastructure Resiliency Case Study

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A new whitepaper has just been published on the VMware website, this paper was written by Aidan Dalgleish, Consulting Architect who’s personal blog can be viewed here and Alan Renouf, Sr Technical Marketing Architect.

Overview

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™ Site Recovery Manager™ and will not be discussed. It is already available in the original VMware vCloud Director Infrastructure Resiliency Case Study.

vSphere PowerCLI is a powerful command-line tool that enables users to automate all aspects of vSphere management, including network, storage, virtual machine, guest operating system (OS) and more. Included since the release of version 5.0.1, vSphere PowerCLI introduced support for vCloud Director. vSphere PowerCLI is distributed as a Microsoft Windows PowerShell snap-in and includes more than 300 PowerShell cmdlets, along with documentation and examples.

This technical paper discusses the use of PowerShell and PowerCLI to automate the recovery of vCloud Director resource clusters.

Download

Read more and download the whitepaper as a PDF from the VMware website here: http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10355

Which Guest OSes Are Supported In vCloud Director?

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Similar to my previous blog post for vSphere, you can now programmatically retrieve the list of supported guest OSes for vCloud Director 5.1 if you are looking to build your own custom provisioning solution or portal. You no longer have to create a static list and you can now dynamically generate the list of supported guest OSes, their supported configurations and capabilities as seen in the vCloud Director UI. In the vCloud 5.1 API you can view the list of supported guestOSes by performing a GET operation on the following URL:

https://[VCD-URL]/api/supportedSystemsInfo

Here is an example output of what you would see:

    <OperatingSystemFamilyInfo>
        <Name>Microsoft Windows</Name>
        <OperatingSystemFamilyId>1</OperatingSystemFamilyId>
        <OperatingSystem>
            <OperatingSystemId>85</OperatingSystemId>
            <DefaultHardDiskAdapterType>4</DefaultHardDiskAdapterType>
            <MinimumHardDiskSizeGigabytes>40</MinimumHardDiskSizeGigabytes>
            <MinimumMemoryMegabytes>512</MinimumMemoryMegabytes>
            <Name>Microsoft Windows Server 2012 (64-bit)</Name>
            <InternalName>windows8Server64Guest</InternalName>
            <Supported>true</Supported>
            <x64>true</x64>
            <MaximumCpuCount>64</MaximumCpuCount>
            <MinimumHardwareVersion>8</MinimumHardwareVersion>
            <PersonalizationEnabled>true</PersonalizationEnabled>
            <PersonalizationAuto>true</PersonalizationAuto>
            <SysprepPackagingSupported>true</SysprepPackagingSupported>
            <SupportsMemHotAdd>true</SupportsMemHotAdd>
            <cimOsId>74</cimOsId>
            <CimVersion>0</CimVersion>
            <SupportedForCreate>true</SupportedForCreate>
        </OperatingSystem>
    <OperatingSystem>
    ...
    ...

For more details on this particular vCloud API, please refer to the vCloud API Reference guide found here.

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Locating vCloud Director Syslog, Installation ID & Other Settings Using The vCloud API

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A few weeks back I needed to find the syslog settings for vCloud Director using the vCloud API for some testing, but after a bit of browsing through the vCloud API Reference, I was not able to find it.

I reached out to fellow colleague Timo Sugliani who has done some fantastic work with the vCloud API and he was able to help me locate the proper API call. It turns out the vCloud Director general settings is actually located under /admin/extension API section and I had thought it was somewhere under /admin. Using either REST Client or cURL, you can perform a GET operation to retrieve the syslog settings as well as other general settings using the following URL:

https://[vcd-url]/api/admin/extension/settings/general

Here is a screenshot of the results which you can see maps back to the settings shown in the above screenshot:

For more details on the properties, you can refer to the vCloud API Reference guide for the general settings here. Hopefully this quick tidbit will come in handy for anyone looking for syslog or other general settings using the vCloud API. Big thanks to Timo for his help!

Get notification of new blog postings and more by following lamw on Twitter:  @lamw

How To Re-Initialize The vCloud Director Appliance Without Redeploying?

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This was a question I received on Twitter from Christopher Wells this morning asking if it was possible to re-initialize the vCloud Director Appliance. This was not something I had done before nor had a need for. I normally deploy multiple vCD appliances in my lab for various testing without any issues. Though, Christopher does bring up an interesting use case for reinitializing an existing vCD appliance so you do not have to redeploy.

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vCloud Director Cell Recommendations for JVM Heap Size

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I was recently asked to provide a recommendation for tuning the JVM heap size on vCD 1.5 cells.  In researching this I pulled up the vCloud Director Performance and Best Practices white papers for vCD 1.0, vCD 1.5 and vCD 5.1 where I found the following recommendations:

vCloud Director 1.0

vCD 1.0 recommends tuning the heap size based on the size of the inventory:

“By default, JVM heap size is configured to be 1GB for the process.  This is good for supporting 5000 inventory cache entries.  If the number of cached entries is changed, for example to 15,000 (an additional 10,000) for a large vCloud Director installation, you might need to increate the JVM heap size to support additional cache entries.”

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vCenter Single Sign-On – Part 4: Pre Install Requirements

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The installation of vSphere vCenter Sign-On is a relatively a straight forward process when planned correctly and as there are many factors of the environment that the installation process will touch, it is important to review the vCenter Single Sign-On Server prerequisites prior to deployment, preferably during the initial design phase. It is important to note that the vCenter Single Sign-On server is the first component to be installed prior to vCenter Server install or upgrade.

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