This has been something I've been meaning to get to the bottom of recently. When you give an Organization vDC storage from a specified Storage Profile, how does that react to VMs that have been provisioned with Thin or Fast? If I allocate 200GB to an Organization vDC, where does it get capped?

If you have provisioned a lot of VMs before, we may have seen this screen: The requested operation will exceed the VDC's storage quota.

This is a bonehead move. I mean, seriously boneheaded. I spent probably 2 weeks trying to wrap my head around what was going on. I was tasked with getting vCloud Director and Nexus 1000v working hand-in-hand on a Vblock for documentation and testing purposes. I had 2 vCenter servers built, one used the vDS and the other used the 1000v. I had followed the setup on Tom Fojta's Cisco Nexus 1000V and vCloud Director 5.1 guide. My setup was using the latest GA of vCloud 5.1.1 and Nexus 1000v 4.2.1.SV2.1.1 which was a bit newer than Tom's, but the process didn't change.

During the configuration, I could create Provider vDCs and the VXLAN pieces would populate without issue. VXLAN Virtual Wires were being created by the Nexus 1000v and that could be seen in both the vSphere Client as well as seeing the port-profiles on the VSM. So I was certain I had configured everything correctly.

I'll admit, I ran into this by accident. But now that I know how and why it works, it makes perfect sense.

There are multiple places to enable the sharing of a network

• During the configuration of an Organization vDC when a new vShield Edge Gateway and Organization Routed External Network are created.
• Viewing the Properties of an Organization Network, including Organization External Direct, Organization Routed External, and Isolated
• During the configuration of a new Organization Network, including Organization External Direct, Organization Routed External, and Isolated

Some may remember an article I wrote a few months ago called Vblock 300 Interactive iPad Demo that showed a really cool interactive 3D demo of the Vblock 300. Well, the people have spoken and I'm proud to say this demo of the Vblock 300 PLUS the Vblock 700 LX and Vblock 700MX are now freely and publicly available to everyone! So how do you get it? Head on over to the Apple App Store (sorry no Android support yet) and do a search for "VCE" or "VCE Catalog of 3D Interactive Demos". Or here is the iTunes Link VCE Catalog of 3D Interactive Demos. I know, the name is a bit convoluted, but it's a pretty slick app. This app is available for both the iPhone and the iPad. Once you have the app downloaded, it will take about 3-8 minutes to download the 3D renderings. On both my iPhone and iPad, there was a timeout error, but when I restarted the app, the download continued once again. Below is a screenshot from the app store and I even did a screen captured recording on my iPad. Have a look and go download!

Not a tech post, just FYI :)

I know i'm a day late, but i figured you wanted to see all the good stuff. As many of you are probably aware, I'm a pretty big halloween fanatic. I moved into my house about 4 years ago and began accumulating more and more decor. I never would have found an exciting hobby like this if it wasn't for the neighborhood I live in. You know how some streets or neighborhoods go all out with christmas lights? Well, our street does that for Halloween each year. It's one of the largest neighborhood gatherings in the US and it takes place right here in Louisville, KY. It's called Halloween on Hillcrest. It's a big deal to the residents who partake in the fun. So much so, that this year we had somewhere between 1500-2000 trick-or-treaters. Yes, you read that correctly, over one thousand and five hundred. This years festivities were not as big as the previous years, but that is perfectly fine by me. We needed it to soften  just a little bit. Besides, the real fun is 2 weeks leading up to Halloween when friends and family come over and we can just have a beer on the porch. The night of Halloween is pure chaos and handing out candy is like being in an assembly line.

Without futher ado, here are some pictures. This is a public facebook link so all 150+ pictures should be viewable. the first 70-80 are houses on the street, the 2nd half are from Halloween night. My house is the "torture chamber" theme so it won't be hard to miss. Hope everyone had a fun and safe halloween!

2012 Halloween on Hillcrest Decorations

Over the past few weeks, I had the pleasure of being a technical reviewer for TrainSignal's new VMware vCloud Director Organizations course. The author of this course is Jake Robinson (@jakerobinson), who is a well known vCloud Guru who works for the vCloud Partner, Bluelock. So what's this new course all about?

First off, this is NOT a vCloud Install, Manage, and Configure tutorial. This course does not take you through the setup and installation of vCloud Director, but instead focuses on what end-users of the cloud will interface. Have you ever accessed the vCloud Director portal and have been completely lost on where to start? Think about this. If you plan on creating a cloud setup for consumption, do you really want to spoon feed every single person that wants to procure cloud resources? Or train the organizational admins for different departments or in the case of SPs, every tenant? Absolutely Not.

This course will help end users and organizational admins understand the rights, controls, and power they each possess inside of vCloud. Every type of user will be different and each needs to know the functionality inside of vCloud Director. This course will lend itself to self-teaching end users how to create vApps from a catalog, publish vApps to a catalog, understand the types of networks available to them, be able to create their own vApp networks, administer the hardware on created VMs, perform their own system customizations, and much more. In fact, Jake even goes deep by showing how to use the vCloud API and PowerCLI cmdlets to script many common things in vCloud Director. I have a feeling we will see Jake come up with more automation courses for the future because these are really cool and gets you started on the ground floor.

One of the most valuable lessons in this series is Lesson 6. We've all read plenty of blogs trying to understand vCloud Director networking with diagrams. But this lesson finally puts the diagrams away and lets you see what happens when you use each type of network with use cases as well. It's a terrific lesson for all those who are still a little "cloudy" about the whole concept.

Head on over to TrainSignal to order your copy today

I've had my fair share of problems with getting this technology working correctly. So let's get going. I have to say thanks to Sachin Thakkar over at VMware for helping me get this puppy rolling.

First thing is first, multicast. I'm not a CCIE, heck I'm not even a very good CCNA anymore. But you need to understand that multicast plays a major role within VXLAN. To simplify things, multicast is like a TV broadcast. There is a provider airing a station and users tune in and out at various times to get the content they want. Start reading about IP Multicast. It will probably take you a week to fully understand it, but enough jibber jabber, let's configure.

For my purposes, I'm lucky enough to be able to test this functionality with a Vblock 700MX connected to a pair Nexus 7010 switches (hell of a lab).

One HUGE gotcha here is that it is best to configure most of these parts before you add vShield Manager to vCloud Director during the setup.

There are some pre-requisites you need to get from your network team for VXLAN functionality:

1 Layer 3 VLAN configured with the following parameters:

IGMP Snooping enabled

IGMP Querier Address assigned

Default gateway for this VLAN

DHCP Helper Address to your DHCP server

DHCP scope for this VLAN

I totally meant to get this out a few days ago but am now finally catching up. During the beta testing period, I had all kinds of problems getting 5.1 working. Come to find out, Synology DSM is not compatible with vSphere 5.1 with BOTH iSCSI and NFS. I HAVE NOT had a chance to test the GA version, but build 732143 which is a beta build along with the beta of DSM 4.1, experienced this issue. This has also been confirmed by Jason Nash and Jeremiah Dooley, so I know it's not just me.

It's possible to mount both NFS and iSCSI datastores, but when you try to build or power on a VM, everything begins to halt when it needs to write to disk. If everything runs in memory (like mounting an ISO and beginning an OS installation) it looks like it's working, but when it comes to install the OS to disk, it begins to crawl. I checked the vmkernel log and here is what is shown. You can see that after I power on the VM, it gets binded to a port but when it tries to read from disk, there are all sorts of errors: