vCD External Networks Creation fail: Gateway cannot be equal to the network definition

I have a Cloud Provider involving me lately, as they kept getting the error below every time they tried to create an External Network in vCloud Director 9.5.

“Gateway cannot be equal to the network definition”

Gateway cannot be equal to the network definition

It was an interesting error message especially in my customer case, where they were confident of providing the right information.  It was a very small mistake that can be easily missed by others. When the above error happened, they were not using the correct Network CIDR. My customer was using 192.168.1.0/24 where he should have been using 192.168.1.1/24. Changing the CIDR to the correct one as below fixed the issue! As it was one of those simple things that others can miss, I thought I will share!

vCD Network CIDR to fix External Network ErrorRead More

VMware Cloud Availability 1.0.1.2 Compatibility Matrix

VMware Cloud Availability (vCAv) is a solution provided by VMware to Service Providers to offer DRaaS with VMware Cloud Director(vCD) as a target.

VMware Cloud Availability vCAv

Two features that makes VMware vCloud Availability valuable to service providers are:

  • It support multi-tenancy out of the box: This means the Service Provider will not have to acquire a separate hardware and setup an isolated vSphere environment per client, which end up improving the TCO and ROI for both the Service Provider and their customers.
  • The vCenter/vSphere versions do not have to match between the service Provider and the Tenant. This is big as the service provider will have the liberty to board customers running a different version of vSphere and vCenter without having to impact the version they run on premise.

A question I am often asked lately when talking about VMware Cloud Availability is: Does the on premise environment of vSphere/vCenter have to match the versions used by the service provider and if not what versions are compatible? The short answer is no, for more info on the supported versions, look below.

Provider Versions

While vCD 8.20 and vSphere/vCenter 6.5 is recommended below is the different versions supported for the Service provider.

  • vCD 8.10, 8.10.1
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Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization RHEV-M Demo

It seems Red Had is shifting their focus from Xen as their virtualization platform to KVM. Their new Red Hat Enterprise Virtualizaiton solution is based on KVM. It seems that Red Hat Enterprise Virtualizaiton Solution, when combined with their new management tool called RHEV-M will offer many advanced features.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Solution seems to successfully copy many of VMware and other Virtualization vendors features like:

1- Live Migration
2- Load Distribution
3- Clustering & High Availability
4- Memory over Commitment
5- Transparent Memory Page sharing
6- Virtual Machine Snapshot
7- Host maintenance mode & many other feature.

If you have been using VMware for a while all these features should be familiar to you, though Red Hat are promising that their pricing model will be much cheaper than VMware. I have not got to see Red Hat pricing yet, and it will be too early to compare the two products pricing. Before sharing a video of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization with you, I believe its worth to mention that reading Red Hat data sheet of the product as well watching their marketing demo video make Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization seem too good to be true for the kind of pricing Red hat is promising to offer.… Read More