VCD

vCloud Availability for vCloud Director: Part 3-VCAV Deployment

Manish Jha

In last post of this series we discussed about logical architecture of VCAV and we discussed about the various components involved which makes the VCAV stack.

In this post we will be deploying VCAV appliance. Current version of VCAV is 2.0.1 and it can be downloaded from here. vCloud Availability appliance deployment is straight forward 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 location where VCAV ova file is stored on your system.

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Review the ova details and hit next to continue.

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Accept EULA and hit Next.

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

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Select the cluster where vm will be deployed and hit Next.

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For prod deployment, thick provisioned disk is recommended. For lab deployment thin provisioned disk works just fine.

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Select appropriate portgroup to which VCAV vm will connect and hit Next.… Read More

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

Manish Jha

In first post of this series we discussed about what is vCloud Availability solution and what problem are we solving by using this product. In this post we will discuss about the architecture of VCAV and what are the components needed to create a full-fledged DRaaS solution using VCAV.

vCloud Availability Logical Architecture

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

Components shown in gray color are the components which tenant and service provider have already deployed in their side. Colored components are the one which we will be deploying later in this series.

vCloud Availability Components

Below table taken fro m VMware docs explains high level overview of components needed for setting up a VCAV environment.

vcav-components-2

And that’s it for this post.

In the upcoming posts of this series, we will deploy these components one by one.… Read More

vCloud Availability for vCloud Director-Part-1-Introduction

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 More

Configuring vCenter SSO Federation in vCloud Director 8.20

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 More

Expired vApps preventing Org vDC from deleting

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“

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

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

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When I tried deleting them, the operation failed with error

Similar error I was seeing in vCD UI.

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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 More

Configuring vCD 9.0 To Send Metric Data to Cassandra DB

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.

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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

… Read More

Installing Cassandra DB for collecting vCD 9.0 Metrics Data

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 More

Find vCloud Director Orphaned VM’s

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

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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 More

Migrate vCloud Director 9.0 DB from MSSQL to Postgres

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

2: Verify presence of newly created database

3: Create vCloud user and assign password to user

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

5: Grant full permission to vCloud user to vCloud database

6: Test the vcloud user access to database

… Read More

vCloud Director 9.0 Single Cell Installation

Manish Jha

vCD 9.0 was announced yesterday and in my last post I touch based on some of the new features that are included in this new release. In this post we will see how to install and configure vCD 9.0.

vCloud Director Hardware and Software Requirements

Before starting with vCloud director 9.0 installation, please make sure all hardware and software requirements are met. Instructions are laid out here

Installing and Configuring a vCloud Director Database

In my lab I am using MSSQL for vCD database. Although I wanted to try the installation with Postgres database, but I refrained myself from doing so as I wanted to test cell management utility for migrating vCD database from MSSQL to Postgres later.

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