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“

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.

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

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

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

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

In our last post Configuring vShield Manager we have seen the initial configuration of vShield Manager. Now its time to start doing configuration of the vCloud Director. In this post I will touch down on different configurable options available in vCloud Director. So Lets start.

Open console of the vCloud Director by typing the URL https://vcloud_director_ip

It will present the welcome page listing the initial configuration items.

Hit Next to proceed. The very first configuration item is accepting the license agreement.

Hitting Next will prompt you to enter the License Key for your vCloud Director instance.

Once you entered your license key hit Next. The next screen will present option to set the administrator username and password and other related options. This username/password will be used for logging onto the vCloud director and perform all the other configurations.

Hit Next to proceed after you have entered the details. Next screen will provide you an option to define the system name.… Read More

In our last post of this series we have configured the vCloud database and made it ready. This database will be used by the vCloud Director Installer to connect to and setup the database.

I am not using the standard ovf vcloud director installer provided by VMware. I wanted to know how the installation is done and configured so I choose to install vCloud Director on RHEL server.

For list of operating system supported for installing vCloud Director please refer the vCloud Documentation Page from VMware.

Pre-requisites before installing vCloud Director:

1: A server with Redhat as guest operating system installed and configured. Hostname and DNS should be configured.

2: The Redhat Server must have 2 NIC’s and each with different IP address (preferred) for HTTP and Console connection. This server should be reachable to your database server over the network.

3: vCloud Director installation file (bin file) downloaded and copied to server where it will be installed.… Read More

In my Last post Troubleshooting vCloud SSL Certificates Issue I have covered how to resolve the ssl certificates issue.

Once the certificate is accepted by the vCloud director configuration script the next thing is that it will ask you for the database connection details so that it can connect to vcloud database and configure it.

This was not end of life it seems as vCloud director has decided to test me one more time. This time I ran into database connection issue as the vCloud director server was unable to contact my database (MSSQL).

I have covered the database preparation steps in my post Configuring MSSQL Database for vCloud Director

I was getting the error as shown in below screenshot

I was getting a connection failure error as vCloud director setup was unable to reach my MSSQL database and I was getting socket timeout error. This was very annoying for me.… Read More