Building a Private Cloud with vCloud Director- Part-1- Introduction

Manish Jha

Recently I decided to learn and implement vCloud Director in my Home Lab. Before proceeding it was important to have an overview of the components which makes the vCloud Director and the associated terms and terminology used.

There are plenty of information available on internet and I am including here some of the information which I found.

Understanding the components of vCloud Suite

The vCloud Suite looks like as shown in below picture. The suite is a combination of multiple products which is required to create a complete Cloud Infrastructure.

vcloud-1

                                                           Graphic Thanks to VMware.Com

The suite can be broken into 3 categories to understand better what are the products that made up the suite and how they work and combine together. As shown in above picture we have 3 categories here:

1: Cloud Infrastructure: This contains the vCloud Director itself at top along with vCloud Networking and Security (vCNS) and SRM.… Read More

Storage design Considerations- Part 2a- Designing for Capacity (Choosing right RAID level)

Manish Jha

In the last 2 posts of this series we had a look into overview of factors affecting your storage design and discussed about designing storage from availability point of view. This post will be focusing on the capacity related factors which you should keep in mind before start configuring your storage devices or jump ahead and start creating your VMFS datastores.

When designing storage from capacity point of view it should be kept in mind that the capacity which we choose should be not only enough for initial deployments but should be scalable as well so as storage expansion in future can go easy without any fuss.

We will start this post with choosing the RAID type for your storage arrays.

Nearly all organization using storage array or SAN in their production environment go ahead with configuring RAID on the array so that disk failures issues in future can be easily dealt with and environment should not suffer any data loss.… Read More

How to remove “No Management Network Redundancy” warning on vSphere

Manish Jha

Today while setting up my lab for vCloud, I noticed all my Esxi hosts were displaying a warning message

“This host currently has no management network redundancy”

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This is a very well known issue for hosts that are part of HA enabled cluster and has only one uplink configured for management network. In my Lab also I have the same configuration of having a single uplink.

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To disable this message from being displayed, edit the cluster settings, click on vSphere HA, then select the Advanced Settings button, click at the top to edit a row and enter the variable name das.ignoreRedundantNetWarning and enter the value true.  If you then turn off HA and back on again, the warnings will not display.

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After setting this value, right click on your Esxi host and select “Reconfigure for vSphere HA”. After this the warning message will disappear.

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Storage design Considerations- Part 2- Designing for Availability

Manish Jha

In my last post Storage Design Considerations- Overview I have discussed few points that are very crucial and must be paid serious attention while designing the storage infrastructure.

In this post I will discuss about the importance of the availability of the storage component in a virtual infrastructure and important considerations:

Availability of the storage component is very crucial. No vSphere or SAN admin will ever want to face a situation of complete outage from storage point of view.

Performance and Capacity issues are not that much disruptive and if very well planned and monitored then those issues can be rectified without any downtime.

To avoid situation of complete outage we should build redundancy on each and every components of the storage devices. All your physical servers can be connected to a one large piece of storage device and failure of it means a situation of chaos for you. So every components and connections have sufficient levels of redundancy to ensure that there are no single points of failure

Whenever we talk about availability we always talk about the concept of the 9’s.… Read More

Storage Design Considerations- Part 1: Overview

Manish Jha

Storage is perhaps one of the most critical piece in any virtualized environment. All the virtual workloads in a small or large environment is running on some sort of storage. It may be either local disks present in a server or can be cheap NAS devices or the expensive SAN devices.

A lot of innovation is going on in storage technology and it’s kinda fueled by the capabilities which are induced in the new hardware versions of the devices. Storage is just not about how much space you are getting against every dollar invested. The advancements in virtualization has affected storage seriously and it is now much more than just capacity.

Due to this reason the vSphere 5.0 release is also known as storage release sometimes. Features such as Storage vMotion help abstract not just the server hardware but also the storage. Storage DRS and Profile Driven Storage features has allowed the admins to get more value from the expenditure made on storage.… Read More

Changing Download Directory In VMware Software Manager

Manish Jha

In my last post I have discussed how to install VMware Software Manager and also discussed that the default directory for downloading the VMware products using this software is C:depot.

If you have enough space on your C: drive then its fine, you need not to worry. But if at the installation time you didn’t paid attention on how much free space is there in your C: drive (if it is running low on space) and just went with the default option presented at the time of installation then it can be cause of worry because in near future it can fill up all the space on your C: drive and which can cause unwanted effects on your system.

In this post we will learn how to change the default depot location for VMware Software Manager.

You will not find any option in the web interface to change the download directory after installation, so how do you change it?… Read More

VMware Software Manager- Simplify Your Downloading Needs

Manish Jha

These days it has become hard to keep track of all VMware’s Product Launches, upgrades, hotfixes and new releases.

To make things simpler VMware launched a new program called VMware Software Manager, that can help you track which is the most recent release of its products and more, download them while checking the integrity of them. It is a free product that dramatically simplifies the download of VMware suites and products.

VMware Download Manager was announced at the same time when vSphere 6.0 was announced and it is still in its early phase (version 1.0) and the download catalog is currently limited to the following Datacenter and Cloud infrastructure products:

  • VMware vCloud Suite 6.0, 5.8, and 5.5
  • VMware vSphere w/ Operations Management 6.0 and 5.5
  • VMware vSphere 6.0, 5.5, and 5.1

Advantage of using Software manager over general downloading method:

Easy to Use

Provides an easy to use interface to find, select & download the content needed to install or upgrade a VMware suite with the push of a button

File Integrity Check

Verifies the suite was downloaded without corruption

New Release Detection

Automatically detects the release of new VMware suites, products and versions

System Requirements

To be able to install and use Download Service, you must ensure that your system meets specific operating system and Web browser requirements.… Read More

VMware Project Fargo- A Technique for Rapid Cloning of Running VMS

Manish Jha

Today I was going through a blog and found one very interesting blogpost which I am going to share with you.

At VMworld 2014 VMware announced a very interesting new project called Project Fargo. This is another name for the Project VMFork.

What is this Project Fargo ?

Fargo/VMFork is a platform currently in technology preview which enables a rapid cloning of running VMs.

It lets you quickly spin up linked clones from a VM that’s already running instead of using disk images. Rather than having a master image stored on a virtual hard disk , the base desktop is an actual running VM. When you need to give a user that same desktop, you can just clone that VM instead of booting up a whole other one. The aim of Fargo is to provides a fast, scalable differential clone of a running VM.

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The key benefits of using this method is that it is instantaneous and can be done from a running VM,  so a new VM spawned would typically take less than 1 second and is in the same running state from where it is cloned.… Read More

Understanding Advanced Snapshot Management

Manish Jha

Deleting virtual machine snapshots without wasting disk space

Before using snapshots on your VM, analyzing free disk space on the VMFS volume is very important.  As a best practice or thumb rule you should have least 20% of the virtual machine’s total disk size as free disk space before using snapshots. But this amount can vary depending upon the type of server or how long you will keep the snapshots or if you are planning to use multiple snapshots.

If you are planning to use snapshots on servers like database servers or file servers the amount of free space that should be present on underlying datastore or VMFS volume will change drastically as comparison to using snapshots on servers like web servers or say DNS server because the amount of data written on disks in case of file or database server is much more than any other type of servers.

More importantly if you are planning to include the memory state of the VM’s with snapshots, you’ll also need to allow for extra disk space equal to amount of RAM assigned to the VM.… Read More

How Snapshots work in VMware

Manish Jha

What is a Snapshot

We have heard this term time and again during our journey with working on VMware and many of us are aware of what it is. Still I am including the formal definition of snapshot as below:

Disk Snapshot in VMware refers to a copy of the virtual machine disk file at a certain point in time. It preserves the disk file system and system memory of your virtual machine by enabling you to revert to the snapshot in case something goes wrong.

Snapshots are very helpful in the cases when you are planning to upgrade or patch your mission critical applications and servers.

When a snapshot is taken on a VM then a new disk file by the name *–delta.vmdk is created in the same folder where VM disks are residing (Unless and until you are not using WorkingDir parameter)

All the write operations are freeze on the original vmdk disk present in your VM and the new write operations will be performed on the newly created delta disk.… Read More