Monthly Archives: June 2015

Building a Private Cloud with vCloud Director-Part 4: Installing vCloud Director

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In our last post of this series we have configured the vCloud database and made it ready. This database will be used by the vCloud Director Installer to connect to and setup the database.

I am not using the standard ovf vcloud director installer provided by VMware. I wanted to know how the installation is done and configured so I choose to install vCloud Director on RHEL server.

For list of operating system supported for installing vCloud Director please refer the vCloud Documentation Page from VMware.

Pre-requisites before installing vCloud Director:

1: A server with Redhat as guest operating system installed and configured. Hostname and DNS should be configured.

2: The Redhat Server must have 2 NIC’s and each with different IP address (preferred) for HTTP and Console connection. This server should be reachable to your database server over the network.

3: vCloud Director installation file (bin file) downloaded and copied to server where it will be installed.… Read More

Troubleshoot vCloud Director Database Connection Issues

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In my Last post Troubleshooting vCloud SSL Certificates Issue I have covered how to resolve the ssl certificates issue.

Once the certificate is accepted by the vCloud director configuration script the next thing is that it will ask you for the database connection details so that it can connect to vcloud database and configure it.

This was not end of life it seems as vCloud director has decided to test me one more time. This time I ran into database connection issue as the vCloud director server was unable to contact my database (MSSQL).

I have covered the database preparation steps in my post Configuring MSSQL Database for vCloud Director

I was getting the error as shown in below screenshot

I was getting a connection failure error as vCloud director setup was unable to reach my MSSQL database and I was getting socket timeout error. This was very annoying for me.… Read More

Troubleshoot vCloud Director SSL Certificates Installation Issue

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Prior to vCloud director installation you need to generate SSL certificates for your http and console-proxy connections. You can also you certificates purchased from certificate issuing company if you are planning to use your vCloud environment over the internet.

I am using self-signed certificates in my Home Lab and instructions for how to generate the certificates I have covered in my earlier post

When vCloud installer is run it invokes a script to configure the vCloud director and in the process it asks for the path to the certificates which will be used in securing the http and console-proxy connections.

I have generated the certificate (vcd.ks) on my root partition as visible in below screenshot.

Now when I executed the vCloud installer (vcloud-director.bin file) it invoked a script for configuring the vCloud setup and was asking for the path to the certificate. I entered /root/vcd.ks but the installer was throwing an error that “file could not be found”.… Read More

Building a Private Cloud with vCloud Director- Part-3-Configuring Database for vCloud Director

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In our last 2 posts of this series we understood the components of vCloud suite and had a look on my Lab Infrastructure. Lets move ahead and start configuring vCloud director components one by one.

vCloud Director supports MSSQL and Oracle as backend database. I am using MSSQL database for my Lab and this post will be covering the steps needed to configure the database prior to vCloud Director Installation.

Setting up MSSQL database is very easy task. Vmware provides the SQL commands to configure the database on the vCloud Director Documentation page. You can access this page by clicking on vCloud Director Documentation page.

Pre-requisite: Make sure your system meet following 2 pre-requisites before using the database setup script:

1: MSSQL database installed and running

2: SQL Server Management Studio installed

The below script will be used in configuring the database. You have to make minor changes in the script to setup according to your infrastructure

… Read More

Building a Private Cloud with vCloud Director- Part-2- Infrastructure Setup

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In my previous post vCloud Director Introduction we have seen an overview of what are the components that makes up a vCloud suite and how each component is tied together to provide a cloud based infrastructure.

For setting up vCloud environment a lot of prerequisites are there which should be met prior to deploying the vCloud director and other components. In this post I am including my Infrastructure design and the preparations which I did.

vCloud requires your vSphere Infrastructure (Esxi + vCenter Server) to be ready before start jumping in and installing vCloud director. Also other components like DNS/AD/Storage should be ready in advance. I am listing here all the pieces which I made ready for my home lab.

Hardware Component

I have a Dell M4800 Mobile workstation laptop with 32 GB of RAM and i7 Quad Core processor. I am running all the components inside Vmware Workstation.

My Lab Components

  1. I installed Server 2012 R2 Datacenter edition as my base OS.
… Read More

Building a Private Cloud with vCloud Director- Part-1- Introduction

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Recently I decided to learn and implement vCloud Director in my Home Lab. Before proceeding it was important to have an overview of the components which makes the vCloud Director and the associated terms and terminology used.

There are plenty of information available on internet and I am including here some of the information which I found.

Understanding the components of vCloud Suite

The vCloud Suite looks like as shown in below picture. The suite is a combination of multiple products which is required to create a complete Cloud Infrastructure.

                                                           Graphic Thanks to VMware.Com

The suite can be broken into 3 categories to understand better what are the products that made up the suite and how they work and combine together. As shown in above picture we have 3 categories here:

1: Cloud Infrastructure: This contains the vCloud Director itself at top along with vCloud Networking and Security (vCNS) and SRM.… Read More

Storage design Considerations- Part 2a- Designing for Capacity (Choosing right RAID level)

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In the last 2 posts of this series we had a look into overview of factors affecting your storage design and discussed about designing storage from availability point of view. This post will be focusing on the capacity related factors which you should keep in mind before start configuring your storage devices or jump ahead and start creating your VMFS datastores.

When designing storage from capacity point of view it should be kept in mind that the capacity which we choose should be not only enough for initial deployments but should be scalable as well so as storage expansion in future can go easy without any fuss.

We will start this post with choosing the RAID type for your storage arrays.

Nearly all organization using storage array or SAN in their production environment go ahead with configuring RAID on the array so that disk failures issues in future can be easily dealt with and environment should not suffer any data loss.… Read More

How to remove “No Management Network Redundancy” warning on vSphere

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Today while setting up my lab for vCloud, I noticed all my Esxi hosts were displaying a warning message

“This host currently has no management network redundancy”

This is a very well known issue for hosts that are part of HA enabled cluster and has only one uplink configured for management network. In my Lab also I have the same configuration of having a single uplink.

To disable this message from being displayed, edit the cluster settings, click on vSphere HA, then select the Advanced Settings button, click at the top to edit a row and enter the variable name das.ignoreRedundantNetWarning and enter the value true.  If you then turn off HA and back on again, the warnings will not display.

After setting this value, right click on your Esxi host and select “Reconfigure for vSphere HA”. After this the warning message will disappear.

Storage design Considerations- Part 2- Designing for Availability

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In my last post Storage Design Considerations- Overview I have discussed few points that are very crucial and must be paid serious attention while designing the storage infrastructure.

In this post I will discuss about the importance of the availability of the storage component in a virtual infrastructure and important considerations:

Availability of the storage component is very crucial. No vSphere or SAN admin will ever want to face a situation of complete outage from storage point of view.

Performance and Capacity issues are not that much disruptive and if very well planned and monitored then those issues can be rectified without any downtime.

To avoid situation of complete outage we should build redundancy on each and every components of the storage devices. All your physical servers can be connected to a one large piece of storage device and failure of it means a situation of chaos for you. So every components and connections have sufficient levels of redundancy to ensure that there are no single points of failure

Whenever we talk about availability we always talk about the concept of the 9’s.… Read More

Storage Design Considerations- Part 1: Overview

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Storage is perhaps one of the most critical piece in any virtualized environment. All the virtual workloads in a small or large environment is running on some sort of storage. It may be either local disks present in a server or can be cheap NAS devices or the expensive SAN devices.

A lot of innovation is going on in storage technology and it’s kinda fueled by the capabilities which are induced in the new hardware versions of the devices. Storage is just not about how much space you are getting against every dollar invested. The advancements in virtualization has affected storage seriously and it is now much more than just capacity.

Due to this reason the vSphere 5.0 release is also known as storage release sometimes. Features such as Storage vMotion help abstract not just the server hardware but also the storage. Storage DRS and Profile Driven Storage features has allowed the admins to get more value from the expenditure made on storage.… Read More