For the second article of the Virtual SAN interoperability series, I showcase the interoperability between Virtual SAN and vCloud Automation Center. This demonstration presents one of the many ways in which vCloud Automation Center can be used to provision virtual machines onto a Virtual SAN infrastructure via a service catalog.
In this scenario, I have created and published three vCloud Automation Center blueprints to a service catalog. All blueprints are accessible to all users in a private cloud. Each blueprint was created based on virtual machine templates that are configured with a VM Storage Policy which was assigned at the vSphere level.
A VM Storage Policy is a vSphere construct that store storage capabilities in order to apply them onto virtual machines or different VMDKs. In this case the capabilities are based on capacity, availability, and performance which the offerings of Virtual SAN. In the demonstration, the focus is around deploying a virtual machine with the highest level of availability. Virtual machine or VMDKs availability configurations are defined by the “Number of Failures to Tolerate” storage capability. The service catalog contains 3 different virtual machine offerings each with a different “Number of Failures to Tolerate” policy as defined below:
Default Availability FTT=1
Medium Availability FTT=2
High Availability FTT=3
As a result of the deployment, you see that the virtual machines objects are distributed across four hosts in the cluster in order to satisfy the availability requirements. It is important to point out that all the configuration use for the demonstration exists within vCloud Automation Center. There was no customization used as part of this implementation. This is just one of the many ways how vCloud Automation Center can be used with Virtual SAN.
While vCloud Automation Center provides partial integration capabilities by default a lot more can be done with custom workflows and advanced configurations.
Key benefits of vCloud Automation Center provides Virtual SAN:
For the second article of the Virtual SAN interoperability series, I showcase the interoperability between Virtual SAN and vCloud Automation Center. This demonstration presents one of the many ways in which vCloud Automation Center can be used to provision virtual machines onto a Virtual SAN infrastructure via a service catalog.
