VCD

Setting up LDAP Authentication in vCloud Director

Manish Jha

Logging in to your vCloud Director system/organisation via the web interface can be achieved in a number of ways. You can use local authentication (users local to vCloud Director), your Active Directory, or another LDAP v3 compliant directory service for authentication and group membership lookup.

After you connect vCloud Director to an LDAP server, you can import system administrators from the groups and users in the LDAP directory. You can also use the system LDAP settings to import users and groups to an organization, or you can specify separate LDAP settings for each organization. An LDAP user cannot log in to vCloud Director until you import them to the system or an organization.

Note:

1: vCloud Director does not support hierarchical domains for LDAP authentication.

2: vCloud Director cannot modify the information in your LDAP directory. You can add, delete, or modify LDAP users or groups only in the LDAP directory itself.… Read More

Building a Private Cloud with vCloud Director-Part 10: Creating and Configuring Org vDC

Manish Jha

In our last post Creating and configuring Organizations we have created a new organization and went through the configuration settings. In this post we will see how to allocate resources to an organization.

Basically allocating resources means configuring org vDC’s and org vDC will be deriving their resources from Provider vDC (PvDC).

Lets begin with configuring the org vDC in this post.

Login to vCloud Director web interface and navigate to Home Tab and select item no 6 “Allocate resources to an organization“

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A new wizard named “New Organization vDC” will be launched and the very first option that you will be presented is selecting the organization to which you want to allocate resources.

Select the organization from the list (I have only one in my home lab) and hit Next.

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The next screen present you with option to select the Provider vDC. As the name suggests Provider vDC is the candidate which provides the resources to any org vDC.… Read More

Building a Private Cloud with vCloud Director-Part 9: Creating and Configuring Organizations in vCloud Director

Manish Jha

In our last post of Configuring Networks in vCloud Director we have created External Network and Network Pools. Network Pools and External Network is consumed by the organizations and org vDC in vCloud Director.

In this post we will learn how to create organization and org vDC and will see how they utilize the network components.

1: Creating Organization

Login to web interface of vCloud Director and navigate to Home tab and click on Item no 5 “Create An Organization”

It will launch the New Organization wizard as shown below. This page lets you create the organization and generates the URL to access your organization.

Note: Organization name should not contain any spaces as it is not supported. Name of the organization affects the associated URL because naming format for URL will be https://name of vcd/cloud/org/name of your organization.

In my home lab I have chosen the name “Developers” for my organization and it generated the URL as https://vcd/cloud/org/Developers

Once you are done setting up organization name hit Next.… Read More

Building a Private Cloud with vCloud Director-Part 8: Configuring Networks in vCloud Director

Manish Jha

In our last post Configuring vCloud Director we have seen the initial configuration of vCloud director. Also we have created one Provider VDC and prepared the Esxi hosts for setting up the vCloud infrastructure.

In this post we will learn how to create networking components in vCloud Director. In my post Understanding vCloud Networking i tried to touch down on theoretical concepts of vCloud Networking. Now we will try our hands out on configuring the different network components in this post.

1: Creating External Network

The External Network is used for inter-Cloud connections. Its “your connection to the outside world” and by outside world I didn’t meant internet access. It’s anything that is taking your traffic out of your cloud. It may be connected to internet but not necessarily.

For creating External Network you should have a port-group created on vDS in advance. I have created a port-group by name “vCloud_Ext_NW” on my vDS and it is connected to a 10.10.10.x/24… Read More

Understanding vCloud Networking

Manish Jha

One of the most complex concept of VMware vCloud Director is understanding the Networking and at times it can be very confusing.

In this post I will try to shed some light on the concepts of networking within vCD. Chris Wahl has explained vCD networking in his video series “vCloud Director Essentials” in a very beautiful way but still I was not 100% confident about concepts.

In this post I will try to explain the concepts which I learned from Chris video series as well as other sources. Feel free to do more research if any info provided here is not clear to you as I said earlier vCD networking is bit difficult to understand in very first attempt.

So Lets begin.

There are 3 types of Networking available within vCD:

  1. External Network
  2. Org Network
  3. vApp Network

These three layers have been created to give the end-user the flexibility needed in a multi purpose virtual datacenter.… Read More

vCenter User has not been assigned a role on vShield Manager

Manish Jha

Problem: Today I faced a new problem in my home lab when I was trying to install the vShield components on my Esxi Hosts. Selecting the Esxi host and navigation to vShield tab was displaying an error

” vCenter User ‘Alexvcadmin’ has not been assigned a role on vShield Manager”

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Reason: The reason for this error was I had not defined any role for the vCenter user (vcadmin in my case) on vShield manager appliance.

Resolution: To fix this issue login to web interface of vShield Manager, select Settings and Reports and navigate to Users tab and click on Add button to add a new user.

As you can see in below screenshot vcadmin user is not visible under user list.

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Clicking on Add button will pop-up a new window where you have to specify the user details and associate this user with available role.

Select the second option “Specify a vCenter User” and provide the details of username in the format of Domainusername

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Hit Next to select the roles for this user.… Read More

Building a Private Cloud with vCloud Director-Part 7: Configuring vCloud Director

Manish Jha

In our last post Configuring vShield Manager we have seen the initial configuration of vShield Manager. Now its time to start doing configuration of the vCloud Director. In this post I will touch down on different configurable options available in vCloud Director. So Lets start.

Open console of the vCloud Director by typing the URL https://vcloud_director_ip

It will present the welcome page listing the initial configuration items.

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Hit Next to proceed. The very first configuration item is accepting the license agreement.

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Hitting Next will prompt you to enter the License Key for your vCloud Director instance.

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Once you entered your license key hit Next. The next screen will present option to set the administrator username and password and other related options. This username/password will be used for logging onto the vCloud director and perform all the other configurations.

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Hit Next to proceed after you have entered the details. Next screen will provide you an option to define the system name.… Read More

Building a Private Cloud with vCloud Director-Part 6: Configuring vShield Manager

Manish Jha

In our last post Installing vShield Manager we learnt what vShield Manager is and how to deploy it. This post will cover the steps needed for configuring the vShield appliance for first use. So let’s start.

Powering-on the vShield Manager VM will give you following console. Unfortunately there is no other way around than configuring it directly from the console for the first time.

Login with the “admin” user and password which you set during deploying the appliance. Sometime you will get an error that “system startup is not complete. Please logout and log back in after a few minutes”

Wait for a few minutes and then try login. Let all the services come up in the vShield VM and then login.

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After successful login you will get Manager > prompt. Type enable here to start begin configuring the appliance. It will ask you for a password. Supply the same password which you have given at the time of deploying the appliance.… Read More

Building a Private Cloud with vCloud Director-Part 5: Installing vShield Manager

Manish Jha

In our last post  Installing vCloud Director we learnt how to install vCloud director on Redhat Server. Before jumping into configuring the vCloud director appliance we will install one more component of vCloud Suite i.e. vShield Manager.

What is vShield  Manager aka vCloud Networking and Security (vCNS)?

vShield Manager is now known as vCloud Networking and Security and it provides firewall protection, traffic analysis, and network perimeter services to protect your vCenter Server virtual infrastructure. It is also abbreviated as vCNS.

vCNS is used to monitor and push configurations to vShield App, vShield Endpoint, and vShield Edge instances. vShield Manager is a virtual appliance deployed as an OVA file downloaded from VMware.

In this post we will learn how to install the vShield Manager appliance for use with vCloud Director.

Prerequisites for installing vCNS

  • One or more ESXi-servers running that are being managed by vCenter server.
  • If you plan to use vShield Manager with vCloud Director then these ESXi-hosts must be in a cluster to be able to configure that cluster for VXLAN-networking.
… Read More

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

Manish Jha

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