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.

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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

vcd-orphaned-vms.PNG

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

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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

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vCloud Director 9.0 Released

Manish Jha

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.
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VLAN tagging and PVLAN’s in vSphere 6

Manish Jha

VLAN’s enable a single physical LAN segment to be further isolated so that groups of ports are isolated from one another as if they were on physically different segments. Using VLAN’s, administrator get following advantages:

  • Integrates the host into a pre-existing environment
  • Isolate and secure network traffic
  • Reduce network traffic congestion

In a physical environment, servers are equipped with dedicated physical NIC that are in turn connected to a physical switch. VLANs in physical world are usually controlled by setting the VLAN ID on the physical switch port and then setting the server’s IP address to correspond to that NIC’s VLAN.

In a virtual environment, dedicating a physical NIC (pNIC) to each VM that resides on the host is not possible. In reality, a physical NIC of the Esxi host service many VMs, and these VM’s may need to be connected to different VLANs. So the method of setting a VLAN ID on the physical switch port doesn’t work.… Read More

Switch Discovery Protocols

Manish Jha

In physical networking space, switches are connected to one or more adjacent switch forming a web of switches which can talk to each other. This web of switches is referred as “neighbourhood of switching”.

Virtual switches (standard or vDS) are connected to these physical switches via physical uplinks. These uplinks are terminating at a particular port of the physical switch and that port itself have some characteristics like a VLAN ID etc defined there. These characteristic values are not exposed to virtual switches by default.

What I mean by this is by just looking at virtual switch diagram in vSphere client, we can’t tell which uplink of vSwitch is connected to which port of physical switch, or what is the make and model of backend physical switch.  

Switch discovery protocols allow vSphere administrators to determine which physical switch port is connected to a given vSphere standard switch or vSphere distributed switch.… Read More

Configuring QoS and Traffic Filtering in vSphere 6

Manish Jha

During my VCAP6-Deploy exam preparation, I found this topic quiet a bit interesting and difficult as well as I have never ever laid my hands on Quality of Service type of thinks in respect of networking. Also my concepts were not very clear on topics like DSCP, QoS, COS etc, so I decided to learn more about these this time and write a blog post on the same.

What is Quality of Service (QoS) and Traffic filtering?

In a vSphere distributed switch 5.5 and later, by using the traffic filtering and marking policy, you can protect the virtual network from unwanted traffic and security attacks or apply a QoS tag to a certain type of traffic.

The goal of using QoS for network is to ensure that the most important network traffic gets to where it needs to go while suffering least amount of latency when there is congestion in network.  … Read More

Configuring NetFlow in vSphere 6

Manish Jha

NetFlow is a mechanism to analyze network traffic flow and volume to determine where traffic is coming from, where it is going to, and how much traffic is being generated. NetFlow-enabled routers export traffic statistics as NetFlow records which are then collected by a NetFlow collector.

Traffic flows are defined as the combination of source and destination IP addresses, source and destination TCP or UDP ports, IP, and IP Type of Service (ToS). Network devices that support NetFlow, tracks and report information on the traffic flows, and send this information to a NetFlow collector. Using the data collected, network admins gain detailed insight into the types and amount of traffic flows across the network.

Netflow was originally developed by Cisco and has become a de-facto industry standard for analysing network traffic. VMware introduced Netflow for vDS in vSphere v5.

Note: Netflow is only supported with vDS and not standard switches.

There are various versions of NetFlow ranging from from v1 to v10.… Read More

LACP Configuration in vSphere 6

Manish Jha

I am currently going through VCAP 6 objective 3.2 and the very firts task in this objective is to deploy a LAG and Migrate to LACP. Although I have read about this in past and we use this in our production environment, I never got a chance to configure this in my homelab because of hardware restrictions (this is true till date 🙁

Well before jumping into LACP configuration, lets discuss a bit about few networking terms here (networking was/is always a big headache for me).

  • Link Aggregation Group (LAG): The simplest definition of LAG can be defined as bonding of ethernet links in order to achieve greater throughput.
  • Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP): This is a protocol which is defined in the 802.1AX standard, and it provides a method for automating LAG configurations. LACP-capable devices discover each other by sending LACP packets (called  LACPDUs) to the Slow_Protocols_Multicast address 01-80-c2-00-00-02. They then negotiate the forming/not forming of the LAG.
… Read More