Building a Private Cloud with vCloud Director-Part 6: Configuring vShield Manager

Manish Jha

In our last post Installing vShield Manager we learnt what vShield Manager is and how to deploy it. This post will cover the steps needed for configuring the vShield appliance for first use. So let’s start.

Powering-on the vShield Manager VM will give you following console. Unfortunately there is no other way around than configuring it directly from the console for the first time.

Login with the “admin” user and password which you set during deploying the appliance. Sometime you will get an error that “system startup is not complete. Please logout and log back in after a few minutes”

Wait for a few minutes and then try login. Let all the services come up in the vShield VM and then login.

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After successful login you will get Manager > prompt. Type enable here to start begin configuring the appliance. It will ask you for a password. Supply the same password which you have given at the time of deploying the appliance.… Read the rest

Building a Private Cloud with vCloud Director-Part 5: Installing vShield Manager

Manish Jha

In our last post  Installing vCloud Director we learnt how to install vCloud director on Redhat Server. Before jumping into configuring the vCloud director appliance we will install one more component of vCloud Suite i.e. vShield Manager.

What is vShield  Manager aka vCloud Networking and Security (vCNS)?

vShield Manager is now known as vCloud Networking and Security and it provides firewall protection, traffic analysis, and network perimeter services to protect your vCenter Server virtual infrastructure. It is also abbreviated as vCNS.

vCNS is used to monitor and push configurations to vShield App, vShield Endpoint, and vShield Edge instances. vShield Manager is a virtual appliance deployed as an OVA file downloaded from VMware.

In this post we will learn how to install the vShield Manager appliance for use with vCloud Director.

Prerequisites for installing vCNS

  • One or more ESXi-servers running that are being managed by vCenter server.
  • If you plan to use vShield Manager with vCloud Director then these ESXi-hosts must be in a cluster to be able to configure that cluster for VXLAN-networking.
… Read the rest

Building a Private Cloud with vCloud Director-Part 4: Installing vCloud Director

Manish Jha

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 the rest

Troubleshoot vCloud Director Database Connection Issues

Manish Jha

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

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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 the rest

Troubleshoot vCloud Director SSL Certificates Installation Issue

Manish Jha

Prior to vCloud director installation you need to generate SSL certificates for your http and console-proxy connections. You can also you certificates purchased from certificate issuing company if you are planning to use your vCloud environment over the internet.

I am using self-signed certificates in my Home Lab and instructions for how to generate the certificates I have covered in my earlier post

When vCloud installer is run it invokes a script to configure the vCloud director and in the process it asks for the path to the certificates which will be used in securing the http and console-proxy connections.

I have generated the certificate (vcd.ks) on my root partition as visible in below screenshot.

cert-1

Now when I executed the vCloud installer (vcloud-director.bin file) it invoked a script for configuring the vCloud setup and was asking for the path to the certificate. I entered /root/vcd.ks but the installer was throwing an error that “file could not be found”.… Read the rest

Building a Private Cloud with vCloud Director- Part-3-Configuring Database for vCloud Director

Manish Jha

In our last 2 posts of this series we understood the components of vCloud suite and had a look on my Lab Infrastructure. Lets move ahead and start configuring vCloud director components one by one.

vCloud Director supports MSSQL and Oracle as backend database. I am using MSSQL database for my Lab and this post will be covering the steps needed to configure the database prior to vCloud Director Installation.

Setting up MSSQL database is very easy task. Vmware provides the SQL commands to configure the database on the vCloud Director Documentation page. You can access this page by clicking on vCloud Director Documentation page.

Pre-requisite: Make sure your system meet following 2 pre-requisites before using the database setup script:

1: MSSQL database installed and running

2: SQL Server Management Studio installed

The below script will be used in configuring the database. You have to make minor changes in the script to setup according to your infrastructure

… Read the rest

Building a Private Cloud with vCloud Director- Part-2- Infrastructure Setup

Manish Jha

In my previous post vCloud Director Introduction we have seen an overview of what are the components that makes up a vCloud suite and how each component is tied together to provide a cloud based infrastructure.

For setting up vCloud environment a lot of prerequisites are there which should be met prior to deploying the vCloud director and other components. In this post I am including my Infrastructure design and the preparations which I did.

vCloud requires your vSphere Infrastructure (Esxi + vCenter Server) to be ready before start jumping in and installing vCloud director. Also other components like DNS/AD/Storage should be ready in advance. I am listing here all the pieces which I made ready for my home lab.

Hardware Component

I have a Dell M4800 Mobile workstation laptop with 32 GB of RAM and i7 Quad Core processor. I am running all the components inside Vmware Workstation.

My Lab Components

  1. I installed Server 2012 R2 Datacenter edition as my base OS.
… Read the rest

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 the rest

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 the rest

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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