Troubleshooting Datastore Cluster Disappearance Issue in vCloud Director

Manish Jha

Today I was facing a weird issue in my vCloud Lab. All my datastores have disappeared from vCloud Director and the storage policy was not showing any datastore. I have included a few snapshots from my lab here:

1: Storage Policies was not listing any datastore

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2: Selecting Datastore and Datastore Cluster was not listing any datastore either

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3: Due to this my Provider vDC was not able to see any datastores

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4: And since Provider vDC had no visibility to any datastore, my Organization vDC was throwing this alert

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This was strange as till last night everything was all right in my lab.

I started googling and got a cool VMware KB 2075366 which helped me in resolving my issue.

This is what I done to resolve the issue:

1: SSH to my vCloud Director Server and navigated to directory /opt/vmware/vcloud/bin and fired the following commands:

[root@vcd bin]# ./cell-management-tool -u svcvcloud -p MYPassword cell –quiesce true
[root@vcd bin]# service vmware-vcd stop

2: Login to SQL Server Management Studio and selected my vCloud Database and ran the following SQL query

Note: Before running the below query make sure you have taken backup of your database

delete from dbo.cluster_compute_resource_inv;… Read More

Building a Private Cloud with vCloud Director-Part 13-Installing and Configuring vCloud Connector

Manish Jha

In this post we will see how to deploy vCloud Connector and use it to facilitate a hybrid cloud architecture. Before going into installation and configuration part first lets see what is vcloud connector

What is vCloud connector?

The VMware vCloud Connector is a tool that facilitates hybrid cloud computing for organizations. The vCloud Connector essentially helps to orchestrate and administer the migration of VM’s across different data centers and clouds.

VMware vCloud Connector links your internal private cloud with public clouds, so you can manage them as a single hybrid environment and transfer workloads back and forth.

vCloud Connector also provides the following key features.

  • Content Sync lets you set up a Content Library to distribute and synchronize templates across clouds.
  • Datacenter Extension (Stretch Deploy) lets you extend your private data center to a public vCloud.
  • Offline Data Transfer enables you to transfer large amounts of data from your private data center to VMware vCloud® Air™.
… Read More

Importing vApp into vCloud Director catalog from vSphere

Manish Jha

In this post I am going to cover how to import a vApp running on vSphere to a catalog in vCloud director.

I have a VM “server2k3” in my vSphere environment which I will be exporting as vApp in my public catalog in vcloud director.

I have selected my organization which have rights to publish catalogs to other organizations in my vCloud director environment. From Catalogs tab I selected option import from vSphere.

From vCenter server list select your vCenter and then select the VM which will be imported. Give a name and description for the imported VM.

In copy or move option I selected “move” otherwise I will have 2 instance of my server 2k3 VM on vCenter server. One appearing as normal VM and one as vApp  under resource pool corresponding to my public organization. Also I have made this vm as gold master.

Hit ok after you are done with selections.… Read More

Building a Private Cloud with vCloud Director-Part 12-Deploying vApps from Catalogs

Manish Jha

In our last post Creating and Publishing Catalogs we have seen how to create a public catalog and share it with organizations present in your cloud infrastructure. Also I have populated the public catalog with one server 2003 vApp.

In this post we will see how an organization named “developers” deploy a new vApp from the public catalog that is shared with it. So Lets begin

Login to vcd web interface and go to Manage and Monitor tab and select organizations. In right hand side of the window double click on developers to open it.

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Go to catalogs tab and verify public catalogs is listed there.

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Now go to home tab and click on “Add vApp from catalog”

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From Look In tab select “Public Catalogs” as we have not defined any organization catalog for organization developers.

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I have imported a server-2k3 vApp in public catalog. Select the vApp and hit next.… Read More

Building a Private Cloud with vCloud Director-Part 11-Creating and Publishing Catalogs

Manish Jha

In our last post of this series we have seen how to  Create and Configure org vDC. Now since Org vDC have been setup, next task is to create some vApps in the organization. But before creating vApps there must be catalogs defined.

What is catalog?

A catalog is a container for vApp templates and media files in an organization. Organization administrators and catalog authors can create catalogs in an organization. Catalog contents can be shared with other users in the organization and can also be published to all organizations in the vCloud Director installation.

There are 2 types of catalogs available within vCloud Director:

1: Public: Public catalogs are created for sharing with many/all organizations within a vCloud infrastructure. Organization administrators from any organization in the vCloud Director can view the vApp templates and media files in a public catalog and copy those files to a catalog in their organization for use by their members.… Read More

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