Yesterday VMware released vCloud Director 9.0 and this version of vCD brings many new things on table which customer’s were looking for some time. We will discuss about Whats new with this release. Vcloud Director 9.0 was first anoounced by VMware in VMworld 2017 on 28/08/2017.

The GA version of vCloud Director 9.0 is build 6681978 and is available for download for service providers from here

Whats new with this release?

Below new features are in this release:

• New HTML5 based UI which is fast (same like HTML client for vSphere). However, the old Flex based UI is still available.
• New VM lifecycle workflows: VM creation task is now completed in one screen as opposed to maximum of seven in previous releases of vCD.
• Multisite management:  If a tenant has workloads running across different Org vDC’s and in more than once vCloud Director instance, then tenant can access all of them via single portal.

Some time back I got a case where one customer deployed a Cisco ASA v10 appliance in his on-prem and attached 2 CD drives in that VM and then transferred that VM in vCloud Air. Post transfer of VM, customer was not able to power on the VM as the second CD drive of VM was not mapped to iso which customer uploaded in his catalog.

If you are familiar with vCD UI, then you might be aware of the fact that vCD do not provides an option to end user to specify particular CD ROM device for inserting ISO file. The only option which user gets is “Insert CD/DVD from Catalog’ and when an iso is inserted, it is always mapped to first CD ROM device at vCenter level.

Customer was looking for mapping the uploaded iso to his second CD ROM device from backend (vCenter) if possible.

Now being an administrator, it was easy for me to do the mapping, but the challenge was to find the datastore location where the ISO file was sitting.… Read More

Yesterday while working on one of the production issue where we had to deprovision a tenant environment in vCloud Air, I noticed that independent disks were preventing automated deprovision of the environment and the error messages were loud and clear in the log files.

It was a new issue for me so I started reading about independent disks in vCloud Director and want to share few things about this.

First of all independent Disk feature in vCD is completely different from an Independent Disk in vSphere. Independent disks can be shared across multiple vApps/VM’s in vCloud Director. This feature was first introduced in vCD v5.1.

Following quote from vCloud Architecture Toolkit document rightly explains about independent disks

The use of independent disks with vCloud Director allows updates of virtual machines without impacting the underlying data.

The feature is designed to enable users to create virtual disks which can be attached to and detached from virtual machines.… Read More

After a long wait I finally got chance to work on vCloud Director ssl certificates. This was the only component in my lab which was still using self-signed certs and that encouraged me to do something new in lab.

A note on vCD SSL certificates

vCloud Director like any other VMware product needs a certificate to be installed on the device that it uses for communication with the other products. By default vCD uses a self-signed certificate. If you have a certificate authority in your environment then you can get the certs created in advance before installing vCloud director and save your self from pain of messing with certificates at later stages.

vCD has 2 IP address which allows support for 2 different SSL endpoints (http and consoleproxy). Each endpoint requires its own SSL certificate. vCloud Director uses a java keystore to read its SSL certificates from.  In a Multi-cell environment you need to create 2 certificates for each cell and import the certificates into vcd java keystore.… Read More

Few days back while working on one of the customer ticket, I came across an incident where customer was reporting that he is not able to see one of his template in his catalog. He sent the VM via ODT to vCloud Air to be imported in his catalog.

I verified that VM was missing from catalog but was present in vCenter. I tried to import the VM again in Catalog by selecting the option “Import from vSphere” but to my surprise the VM was showing up in the list for selection.

I have never seen such behaviour in VCD. Even if import of template is failed midway, the item is listed in catalog with a question mark against it and status of item reads as “failed to create“

After scratching my head for 15-20 minutes and checking with my peer if he had seen any such issue in past, I decided to employ API calls for catalog query (GUI is a big fat lier sometimes) and to my surprise I was seeing 2 entries for catalog items.… Read More

In this post, I will demonstrate how to install RMQ for vCloud Director. Before jumping into any lab activity, let’s learn first what is RabbitMQ and why we need it.

What is RabbitMQ?

RabbitMQ is an open-source message-queuing software that helps facilitate message exchange between 2 or more applications. The exchange of messages is done via a queue which is defined by the administrator. An application can publish a message to the queue which can be retrieved or consumed by a different application.

A message can include any kind of information for example, it could have information about a process/task that should start on another application may be on another server or it could be just a simple text message.

The queue-manager software stores the messages until a receiving application connects and takes a message off the queue. The receiving application then appropriately processes the message.

How does it work?

RabbitMQ works by offering an interface, that connects message senders (Publishers) with receivers (Consumers) through an exchange (Broker) which distributes the data to relevant lists (Message Queues).… Read More