vCloud Availability for vCloud Director: Part 4: Installing Cloud Proxy for vCD

September 9, 2018 Manish Jha

In the last post of this series, we deployed the VCAV appliance and discussed that it will be configured later once we are done with the deployment of all the other needed components.

In this post, we will add a vCloud proxy cell to an existing vCloud Director environment.

If you are not following along with this series, then I recommend reading earlier posts of this series from below links:

1: vCloud Availability Introduction

2: vCloud Availability Architecture & Components

3: VCAV Deployment

What is a Cloud Proxy?

As per VMware documentation:

The Cloud Proxy is a standalone, optional component of vCloud Director that can act as a generic Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection proxy. It supports forwarding incoming TCP connections and listening incoming connections.

The Cloud Proxy creates virtual connections for data to travel from the on-premise to the service provider (cloud) site and reverse.

For installing Cloud Proxy, you should have your vCD environment already deployed and fully configured.… Read the rest

vCloud Availability for vCloud Director: Part 3-VCAV Deployment

September 9, 2018 Manish Jha

In the last post of this series, we discussed the logical architecture of VCAV and the components that constitute the VCAV stack.

In this post, we will be deploying the VCAV appliance. The current version of VCAV is 2.0.1, and it can be downloaded from here. vCloud Availability appliance deployment is a straightforward task and is pretty much like any other standard OVA deployment.

Connect to your management vCenter Web Client and choose to Deploy OVF Template and browse to the location where the VCAV OVA file is stored on your system.

Review the OVA details and hit next to continue.

Accept the EULA and hit Next.

Provide a name for the VCAV VM and select the data center where it will be deployed.

Select the cluster where the VM will be deployed and click Next.

For prod deployment, a thick-provisioned disk is recommended. For lab deployment, a thin-provisioned disk works fine.… Read the rest

vCloud Availability for vCloud Director-Part-2-Architecture & Components

September 9, 2018 Manish Jha

In the first post of this series, we discussed what the vCloud Availability solution is. In this post, we will discuss the architecture of VCAV and the components needed to create a DRaaS solution using VCAV.

vCloud Availability Logical Architecture

The architecture relies solely on the service provider environment. There can be slight differences in components that different service provider uses. Typical components can include what is visible in the diagram below.

Components shown in gray are the components that the tenant and service provider have already deployed. Colored components are the ones that we will be deploying later in this series.

vCloud Availability Components

The table below explains a high-level overview of the components that are needed for setting up a VCAV environment.

And that’s it for this post. In the upcoming posts of this series, we will deploy these components one by one.

I hope you find this post informative.… Read the rest

vCloud Availability for vCloud Director-Part-1-Introduction

September 9, 2018 Manish Jha

What is vCloud Availability for vCloud Director (VCAV) ?

vCloud Availability for vCloud Director is a Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) solution that provides simple and secure asynchronous replication and failover for vSphere managed workloads.

VMware released vCloud Availability for vCloud Director keeping in mind to provide cloud innovations to vCloud Air Network partners so that they can implement this software solution to provide Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) to customers.

Customer’s who are using vCloud Air, knows that vCloud Air uses vSphere Replication to provide the DRaaS service to their customers. This is a very similar solution which vCAN partners will now be using for DRaaS.

Since vCloud Air is not present in all regions, vCloud Availability will be a blessing for vSphere customers because they can now buy and use DRaaS service from a local partner.

In last 3-4 years there is a shift in technology as more and more customer are now adopting to cloud solutions.… Read the rest

Configuring vCenter SSO Federation in vCloud Director 8.20

January 31, 2018 Manish Jha

There are 3 authentication methods that are supported by vCloud Director:

1: Local: These are the local users which are created at the time of installing vCD or creating any new organization. If you have configured vCD with default configuration, then the first local account that is created is “administrator” user who is system admin for the vCD.

2: LDAP service: A LDAP service enables the organization to use their own LDAP servers for authentication. Users can then be imported into vCD from the configured LDAP. If you have a multi-tenant based vCD deployment, then each organization can use their own LDAP service for authentication.

I wrote an article in past on how to use LDAP authentication with vCD.

3: SAML Identity Provider: A SAML Identity Provider can be used to authenticate users in an organization. SAML v2.0 metadata is required for the service to be configured. The metadata must include the location of the single sign-on service, the single logout service, and the X.509 certificate for the service.… Read the rest

Expired vApps preventing Org vDC from deleting

January 28, 2018 Manish Jha

Yesterday I was trying to delete an Org vDC from vCloud Air portal and it was failing time and again. On checking vCloud Director in backend I was seeing error “Cannot delete VDC“

When I tried deleting it directly from vCD, it was bitching about some expired vApp templates and was asking to remove them first.

On checking the Expired items tab, I found that there were few expired vApps

When I tried deleting them, the operation failed with error

The requested operation could not be executed on VM "VMTest1(com.vmware.vcloud.entity.vm:c8439077-3148-4487-b268-32c8af845108)". Stop the VM and try again

1	The requested operation could not be executed on VM "VMTest1(com.vmware.vcloud.entity.vm:c8439077-3148-4487-b268-32c8af845108)". Stop the VM and try again

Similar error I was seeing in vCD UI.

I tried deleting it via API as GUI was not behaving like a good friend.

Fired below API

# curl -sik -H “Accept:application/*+xml;version=5.6” -H “x-vcloud-authorization:Auth” -X DELETE https://us-california-1-3.vchs.vmware.com/api/compute/api/vApp/vapp-63592b99-fe00-41f3-bfbd-dbe27d3e9258… Read the rest

Configuring vCD 9.0 To Send Metric Data to Cassandra DB

October 5, 2017 Manish Jha

In last post of this series, we learnt how to install and configure Cassandra DB for collecting metrics data from vCD. We also discussed that kairosdb is no longer needed to be installed alongwith cassandra for this purpose.

In this post we will learn how to configure vCD 9.0 to send metrics data to Cassandra DB.

This configuration is done by using cell management tool utility which is located in /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin directory.

Run cell-management-tool cassandra –help command to see all available options which you need to specify to configure vCD correctly so that it start sending all metrics data to cassandra.

Typically this is the command to do so:

[root@vcd90 ~]# /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/cell-management-tool cassandra –configure –create-schema –cluster-nodes 192.168.109.53 –username cassandra –password cassandra –port 9042 –ttl 15

Verifying Cassandra settings...
Cassandra setting valid for node: 192.168.109.51
Cassandra configuration settings verified successfully
vcloud_metrics keyspace created...
vm_metrics table created...
adding configured metrics to the schema...

… Read the rest

Installing Cassandra DB for collecting vCD 9.0 Metrics Data

October 4, 2017 Manish Jha

Cassandra DB is needed for capturing and storing vCloud Director metrics data so that it can be displayed in portal to end users so that users are aware of VM resource utilization etc.

Prior to vCD v9.0, we needed kairosdb + cassandra together for capturing and storing the metrics data, but things have changed now. VMware has removed the requirement of kairosdb and now metrics data can be sent straight to cassandra database. This metric data in turn can be viewed in tenant UI.

As per vCD 9.0 documentation

Cassandra is an open source database that you can use to provide the backing store for a scalable, high-performance solution for collecting time series data like virtual machine metrics. If you want vCloud Director to support retrieval of historic metrics from virtual machines, you must install and configure a Cassandra cluster and use the cell-management-tool to connect the cluster to vCloud Director.

… Read the rest

Find vCloud Director Orphaned VM’s

October 3, 2017 Manish Jha

We all are familiar with concept of orphaned VM’s in vSphere. However orphaned VM’s in vCloud Director have slightly different meaning.

From vCD perspective, virtual machines that are referenced in the vCenter database but not in the vCloud Director database are considered orphan VMs because vCD cannot access them even though they may be consuming compute and storage resources. This kind of reference mismatch can arise for a number of reasons, including high-volume workloads, database errors, and administrative actions.

Starting with vCD 8.2, VMware added one more option to cell management utility to locate such orphaned VM’s so that they can be removed or re-imported into vCloud Director. This utility is not available with any vCD version prior to 8.20.

The command to find orphaned VM’s is find-orphan-vms command which is used in conjunction with cell-management-tool and enables an administrator to list these VMs .

To list the options available with this command, run command:

# /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/cell-management-tool find-orphan-vms –help

If you are using self-signed certificates in vCD, then you have to specify truststore file and truststore password along with supplying vcd username/password and vcenter credentials etc.… Read the rest

Migrate vCloud Director 9.0 DB from MSSQL to Postgres

October 2, 2017 Manish Jha

With vCloud Director 9.0, VMware introduced postgres as supported database for vCD. If you are planning to use postgres as DB, then you should install Postgres v 9.5 on a supported OS.

In our last Post I mentioned that I purposefully configured MSSQL as DB from my new vCD 9.0 installation, as I wanted to test the migration of vCDDB from MSSQL to Postgres. This post is focused on how to do so.

If you are new to postgres and do not know how to install it, then follow this blog for installation instructions which are pretty easy and straight forward.

Once you have installed postgres and started services, next is to create database for vCD. Follow below commands to do so

1: Create Database

postgres=# CREATE DATABASE vcloud;
CREATE DATABASE

1 2	postgres=# CREATE DATABASE vcloud; CREATE DATABASE

2: Verify presence of newly created database

postgres=# l
 List of databases
 Name | Owner | Encoding | Collate | Ctype | Access privileges
-----------+----------+----------+---------+-------+-----------------------
 postgres | postgres | UTF8 | C | C |
 template0 | postgres | UTF8 | C | C | =c/postgres +
 | | | | | postgres=CTc/postgres
 template1 | postgres | UTF8 | C | C | =c/postgres +
 | | | | | postgres=CTc/postgres
 vcloud | postgres | UTF8 | C | C |
(4 rows)

postgres=# l

List of databases

-----------+----------+----------+---------+-------+-----------------------

postgres | postgres | UTF8 | C | C |

template0 | postgres | UTF8 | C | C | =c/postgres +

template1 | postgres | UTF8 | C | C | =c/postgres +

vcloud | postgres | UTF8 | C | C |

(4 rows)

3: Create vCloud user and assign password to user

postgres=# create user vcloud;
CREATE ROLE

postgres=# alter user vcloud password 'Telstra@123';
ALTER ROLE

postgres=# create user vcloud;

CREATE ROLE

postgres=# alter user vcloud password 'Telstra@123';

ALTER ROLE

4: Enable the database owner to log in to the database

postgres=# alter role vcloud with login;
ALTER ROLE

1 2	postgres=# alter role vcloud with login; ALTER ROLE

5: Grant full permission to vCloud user to vCloud database

postgres=# grant all privileges on database vcloud to vcloud;
GRANT

1 2	postgres=# grant all privileges on database vcloud to vcloud; GRANT

6: Test the vcloud user access to database

postgres@vpostgre-mgmtdb-a:~> psql -d vcloud -U vcloud
psql.bin

… Read the rest