vCloud Director

Understanding vCloud Networking

Manish Jha

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

Building a Private Cloud with vCloud Director-Part 7: Configuring vCloud Director

Manish Jha

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.

vcd-conf1

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

vcd-conf2

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

vcd-conf3

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.

vcd-conf4

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

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 More

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

db-1

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

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 More

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 More

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