If you have already took the effort to build your vCenter Single Sign On server while upgrading to vSphere 5.1, then it might be worth while to benefit of it to unify your login to vCloud Director. Wouldn’t be nice if you don’t have to enter your credential separately for vCloud Director after you have already logged on to your vSphere Web Client or the opposite. Is not this the idea behind including SSO in vSphere 5.1. In this blog post, I will share with you the exact instructions on how to configure your vCloud Director to utilize vCenter SSO to login vCloud Admins to the system.

To configure vCloud … Read More

While trying to setup the Redhat Linux machine with two interfaces to install vCloud Director into it, I had some funny problem with my network cards configuration. I have not installed vCloud Director yet at that time, so I was sure it is some Redhat Linux or networking problem rather than vCloud Director in specific. The problem I had, that I was able to ping one of the two NICs IPs from a different subnet, where I could not get the second NIC which I was planning to use for vCloud Director Remote Console to ping. Other machines within the same subnet were able to ping both NICs IPs, while … Read More

It seems there has been quite few articles that try to explain the vCloud Director 5.1 Upgrade Process out there in the blog sphere, but most of them focus on the steps on how to upgrade vCloud Director Cells and the Database. As many of them do quite good job at that, I am not going to re-invent the wheel and will just list few of them through this blog post. Though what seems to me missing of most of these articles is the order to carry out the vCloud Director environment components upgrade process in.

vCloud Director includes quite few moving parts and integrations, so you will need to … Read More

Cloud Computing has been picking up for the past few year, and it seems to catch up with the way virtualization has been spreading up. VMware has been one of the leading companies enabling both public and private clouds. One of the main products helping our customers build their own Infrastructure As A Service Cloud or as many call it IAAS is vCloud Director. vCloud Director has added an extra abstract layer over virtualization & quite few terminologies that many customers are still not aware of and can get initially confused by it. For that VMware has released a series of videos that will help you pickup on vCloud Director … Read More

While VMware vCloud Director 1.5.1 has a lot of flexibility, one thing it seems missing is getting VMs to join a specific OU in Active Directory Domain. Making your vApps VMs join a particular domain is quite easy using the vCloud Director web interface. All you have to do is to configure your domain information in your vCD, then configure the join domain parameters as showing in the below screenshot.

While configuring vCD to a level where it get vAPP VMs to join a specific Active Directory Domain is a straight forward task, getting those vAPP VMs to join in a specific OU require a bit more work and can … Read More

I have finally come back to this, as I have been planning to do this for a while. I have for a while wanted to document how to create your own small vCloud environment maybe for a lab, demo, or just testing the product and learning how its setup. I have lately put different scattered vCloud Director 1.5 articles, but they were in no sequence. I thought maybe I should create a vCloud Director 1.5 environment creation tutorial then build and add links to my other vCloud Director articles to it. OK, lets start.

Before you even start by thinking about creating a vCloud environment, there is pre-requisite that you … Read More

I have been doing some testing lately with vCloud Director 1.5.1 & working with blocking tasks was one of them. I have configured blocking tasks for “Instantiate vApp from Template”, so the task of deploying a vApp will be blocked and I get to approve it before continuing as shown in the below screen shot.

Although when ever I tested to deploy a vAPP the vAPP deployment was blocked and give a “pending processing” status as expected and showing in the screen shot below, I could not see the task anywhere under my blocking tasks.

Below is a screen shot of my blocking tasks which is oddly did not show … Read More

Ofter after you complete the implementation of your vCD you discover that your company need to decommission the MS Sql server you installed the database of you VMware vCloud Director Database on. This is only one reason why you would have to move a vCloud Director SQL Database to a new Database server, but everyday I learn a new reason from a different customer. What ever your reason to move your vCD DB to a new server, the below procedure is how you do it.

Note: This example assume your DB name is vCloud, make sure you use the database name instead. I have marked it in read when ever … Read More

While setting up VMware vCloud Director  1.5 using MS SQL Server, you will need to enter the SQL Server & database information during the configuration phase of the setup. Although during the configuration wizard you are asked which port SQL Use and the answer to that is given to be “default” which you will assume it will revert to the correct MS SQL Server port 1433, it does not to work out that way in vCloud Director 1.5.1 for some reason. To avoid having a problem with the setup, I would recommend you do the following when answering the database info in the vCloud Director wizard.

vCloud Director 1.5.1 … Read More

I have been lately seeing the question of how to add a Second vCloud Director Cell to an existing single Cell VMware vCloud Director Setup to build a multi-cell vCloud Director raising often. Actually the question seems to get to phrased differently by different people. The most heard question, is how to increase the availability of my vCloud Director server or how to cluster my VMware vCloud Director server. Well, vCloud Director it self does not really support or use clustering for high availability. On the other hand, you can create a multi-cell vCloud Director setup and load balance between your vCloud Director Cells which will help you achieve both … Read More

Playing with my vCloud Director lab lately, I have end up with a trouble adding one of my ESXi 5 hosts to my vCloud Director 1.5 due to an error installing the vCloud Director agent. I knew I have used the same host with beta install of vCloud Director before, & that could be the reason why the agent is missing up. Of course, I could have re-installed the ESXi host in 15 minutes and be back on track, but I decided to burn sometime trying to figure out how to fix it without re-installing it. I was able to achieve that by uninstalling the earlier installed vCloud Agent then … Read More

As more and more companies offer different way of doing cloud computing, the concept it self is getting fuzzier to the consumer. Further, after VMware has prompted the idea of Hybrid Cloud Computing, many other companies have copied the road map as usual and started to talk about it as being the first to promote it. The funny part is when you look about how to move workload between the Private & Public cloud which was one of the matters discussed in VMware original Hyprid Cloud plan, you will find not much of an answer or plan at most vendors. VMware VCloud Connector was the first part of the answer … Read More

I am still no vCloud expert at the moment, although I am learning my way through. This post will not cover how to carry out the installation of vShield or vCloud Director. I am just planning to bring the message of these products being compatible together. if what you are looking for is the instruction of installing them or integrating them together, you might want to visit my Colleague Hany Micheal blog at Hypervizor.com. The reason I am putting this brief post here, there  is too much of confusion if vCloud Director is compatible with the different vShields products.

The answer for that is yes vCloud Director is compatible with … Read More

Today, I have been lucky to get the chance to attend the London 2011 VMUG. It has been arranged by a great team of VMware enthusiasts (Martyn Storey, Mark Stockham, Alan Renouf, Scott Vessey, Gabrie van Zanten, Simon Long, Chris Dearden). The arrangement was great & I would say over 100 people were in the room & participating in the sessions. Alan has pulled a great session about PowerCLI, which I expected from the PowerCli legend. I am glad I attended the PowerCli session as that got me started. I am really thankful for the UK VMUG team to allow me to attend while they were over-booked.

Few quick interested … Read More