VMware Cloud Marketplace Integration with VCD App Launchpad

Manish Jha

In this post I will walk through steps of integrating VMware Cloud Marketplace with App LaunchPad in VCD. If you are new to App launchPad, then feel free to read my previous Article on this topic to have some background about this product.

What is VMware Cloud MarketPlace?

As per VMware Documentation

VMware Cloud Marketplace is a new service that will allow VMware partners to easily publish their solutions in a variety of formats (Ova’s, Container images or as SaaS offering).

VMware Cloud Marketplace offers customers a way to discover and consume third-party solutions in the same way that they discover and consume other VMware cloud services. The engineered and curated experience of VMware Cloud Marketplace also delivers to our customers the peace of mind that these solutions are validated to work on their target VMware platforms.

Advantage of Using VMware Cloud MarketPlace?

Customers can search for, filter through, and select the third-party solution that’s just right for them.… Read More

VCD Object Storage Extension-Part 7: Bucket & Object Operations

Manish Jha

In last post of this series, we learnt how to enable VCD tenants to consume Object Storage. In this post we will learn various operations that can be performed on bucket and objects stored within a bucket.

If you have landed directly on this post by mistake, I would recommend reading previous articles from this series:

1: Introduction & Architecture of VCD OSE

2: Infrastructure Preparation

3: Installing Cloudian Hyperstore

4: Configuring Cloudian for VCD Integration

5: VCD OSE Installation & Cloudian Integration

6: Service Provider Configuration

1: Bucket Creation

Login to VCD as tenant and navigate to Object Storage plugin from context menu.

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Go to buckets tab and click on get started button.

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Provide a name for the bucket and hit save. 

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2: Viewing Bucket Properties

Click on newly created bucket and select the Properties tab to view attributes associated with a bucket. 

You can share the S3 url associated with bucket with other users, so that they can consume this bucket for storing data/objects.… Read More

VCD Object Storage Extension-Part 6: Service Provider Configuration

Manish Jha

In last post of this series, I explained end to end installation & configuration workflow of VCD OSE. In this post I will walk through steps of finalizing OSE configuration from CSP point of view.

If you have landed directly on this post by mistake, I would recommend reading previous articles from this series:

1: Introduction & Architecture of VCD OSE

2: Infrastructure Preparation

3: Installing Cloudian Hyperstore

4: Configuring Cloudian for VCD Integration

5: VCD OSE Installation & Cloudian Integration

Login to VCD with system admin credentials  and navigate to Home > Customize Portal. Select VCD Object Storage Extension and click on Publish button.

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Select the scope of publishing OSE plugin and also select the Tenants to whom you want to expose this plugin.

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From Main menu, go to Object Storage sub menu and select Tenants tab.

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To enable Tenants to consume Object Storage, first we have to enable them to do so. … Read More

VCD Object Storage Extension-Part 5: OSE Installation & Cloudian Integration

Manish Jha

In the last post of this series, I discussed configuring Cloudian so that we can enable its integration with vMware Cloud Director.

In this post, I will walk through the steps of installing and configuring OSE and its integration with Cloudian.

If you have landed directly on this post by mistake, I would recommend reading previous articles from this series:

1: Introduction & Architecture of VCD OSE

2: Infrastructure Preparation

3: Installing Cloudian Hyperstore

4: Configuring Cloudian for VCD Integration

Installation Requirements

1a: OS Requirements: VCD OSE is shipped as an RPM package and can be installed on the OSE supported version of the Linux distribution. The following Linux OS are supported:

  • CentOS 7/7
  • RedHat Enterprise Linux 7
  • Oracle Linux 7

Also, OSE needs Java 1.8 installed on the machine where OSE rpm will be installed.

1b: Hardware Requirements: OSE is deployed in three form factors. Small, medium, and large. In small form factor, the OSE server needs:

  • 4 vCPU
  • 8 GB RAM
  • 120 GB Disk space

For medium and large deployment requirements, please refer to the OSE Documentation 

1c: Database Requirements: VCD OSE supports Postgresql 10.x… Read More

VCD Object Storage Extension-Part 4:Cloudian Configuration for VCD

Manish Jha

In last post of this series, I explained cloudian installation workflow. In this post I will cover the steps of configuring cloudian so that it can be integrated and consumed by VMware Cloud Director.

If you have landed directly on this post by mistake, I would recommend reading previous articles from this series:

1: Introduction & Architecture of VCD OSE

2: Infrastructure Preparation

3: Installing Cloudian Hyperstore

Connect to cloudian server by typing https://<Cloudian-Fqdn>:8443/Cloudian and use credentials admin/public

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1: Create Default Storage Policy

A storage policy is a method of storing and protecting S3 object data and object metadata.

To create a new storage policy, navigate to Cluster > Storage Policies tab and click on + Create Storage Policy option.

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Provide name & Description for the policy 

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Leave the “Group Visibility” unspecified so that this policy is visible to all groups and click on save button.

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Your new storage policy is created.… Read More

VCD Object Storage Extension-Part 3: Installing Cloudian Hyperstore

Manish Jha

In last post of this series, I discussed about prerequisites that needs to be met before attempting installation of cloudian object storage.

In this post I will walk through steps of install.

To start with install process, we need to first upload cloudian binary and license file on the centos vm that will run cloudian hyperstore service.

Cloudian installation is triggered via below command:

[root@cloudian ~]# ./CloudianHyperStore-7.2.1.bin cloudian_vmware.lic

Make a note of the configuration directory as installation script and other important files are created there. 

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Cloudian System Setup

we have to perform network/disk setup etc and create survey.csv file that is used during install. To perform system setup, run command:

# /opt/cloudian-staging/7.2.1/system_setup.sh

You will be presented with an interactive menu as shown below.

cloudian-sys-setup

Select option 3 for disk setup. 

Make sure right disk (blank) is selected here. Press C to configure selected disk.

cloudian-disk-setup

Cloudian installer script will format the disk as ext4 and mount it in fstab file.… Read More

VCD Object Storage Extension-Part 2: Infrastructure prepration

Manish Jha

In first Post of this series, I explained what is VCD Object Storage Extension solution/service and discussed about high level architecture of the same. In this post I will walk through prepping infrastructure for object storage extension implementation.

Note: This blog series is only focussed on cloudian implementation.

There are two choices for implementing cloudian object storage:

1: Software-Defined Storage: Deploy Cloudian software on your existing VMware compute and storage platform. In this mode you install cloudian binary on supported RHEL/CentOS machine. This machine can run as a VM or directly on bare metal servers.

2: Appliance: Deploy as a pre-configured storage appliance from Cloudian.

For Lab/POC purpose, option 1 is the preferred choice. 

Following prerequisites must be completed before starting cloudian implementation.

1: Deploy a CentOS (7.4 or later) VM

Deploy centos vm with below specifications for cloudian install:

  • vCPU: 4
  • vRAM: 16 GB
  • vDISk: 20 GB (OS), 350 GB (data)
  • NIC’s (optional): 2 (One for management and one for storage traffic)

Do not create any partition on disk 2 during centos install.… Read More

VCD Object Storage Extension-Part 1: Introduction & Architecture

Manish Jha

Recently, I got the chance to work on setting up Cloudian Object Storage for VMware Cloud Director and present some use cases of using object storage in conjunction with VCD. This blog series is aimed at jotting down all my learnings and mistakes that I encountered during setup.

In the first part of this series, let’s just understand what a VCD object storage extension solution is and how it works.

What is VCD Object Storage Extension?

VCD has evolved amazingly over the last couple of years, and many features, such as Container Service Extension, Data Protection (Veeam and Rubrik) integration, etc., were introduced.

The new addition to this portfolio was Object Storage which has become one of the key pillars of a modern cloud platform. Object Storage can now coexist with typical block storage or vSAN implementation with VCD. Tenants can use object storage to store cold data like vApp templates, media files, DB backups, etc.… Read More

How to Reuse VCF Cloud Builder For Another Bringup

Manish Jha

Those who are working on VCF are aware of the fact that, after a successful bringup, the only option you get is to launch SDDC Manager. There is no option in UI to go back to cloud builder initial screen where you can upload configuration workbook xls/json to start a fresh bringup.

sddc-bringup

One work around to this problem is to take snapshot of cloud builder before bringup and revert snapshot after succesful bringup to start again.

But this task seems very tedious to me. If you are running a huge infrastructure and performs bringup almost every day, this will not be an ideal situation.

In this post I will explain how to get rid of this annoying problem.

This can be achieved by running an internal one liner API call on cloud builder vm as root user.

Just refresh the cloud builder ui after running above API call and job done. … Read More

How To Verify if SDDC Bringup is AVN Enabled in VCF?

Manish Jha

Recently I saw an interesting thread on slack where one of the consultant was seeing deploy button grayed out for VRSLCM deployment. Consultant was not aware if the management domain bringup was AVN enabled or not. 

AVN was first introduced in VCF 3.9 and it enabled deploying vRealize components on logical segments instead of VLAN backed portgroup. AVN brought many enhancements with Cloud Foundation. Please read this Article to know more about AVN.

Since AVN enablement is optional and you can chose not to use it during SDDC bringup This is controlled via a parameter in VCF configuration workbook and ca be enabled later also.

vcf-avn

Now the question is how to verify whether or not a SDDC bringup is AVN enabled bringup. There are couple of ways to verify this.

1: Through PowerVCF

PowerVCF is a PowerShell module to interact with SDDC Manager and the VCF stack. If you have PowerVCF is installed, you can connect to sddc-manager using below command:

# Connect-VCFManager <sddc-manager-fqdn> <sso-credentials>

and then run command: Get-VCFApplicationVirtualNetwork

… Read More