So I have installed vCenter Chargeback before, but i remember the installation being a little tricky. I tried doing a quick google search to see if there were any good detailed step by steps out there and nothing really turned up (or their blog doesn't have good SEO). So let's get going

1. Make sure your Windows VM is set with a static IP address.

2. Create a database. Oracle and SQL can be used. I'm going with SQL. Pretty Simple to do and no advanced options to change.

This was something sent by one of my readers and felt it was a worthy post.

There is a pretty cool little mulit-tiered Spring application that comes from VMware called Pet Clinic. I got the chance to play around with it for a little while during a current POC process and using it as an easy way to get apps spun up for tradeshows.

Pet Clinic has 2 virtual machines inside the vApp. An Apache Server and a Tomcat + Database Server. The vApp itself comes configured with static IP addresses, pre-configured application based on IPs, and a CentOS at a default.

When playing with the vApp, it took about 5-8 minutes to boot because of the all the standard services set to boot. That was the first thing that needed to be fixed. Second, customizations needed to happen. vCloud Director does a good job at doing the customization because it's done natively. Once the customization is done it breaks the spring application because the apache server is hard coded to point to the TC+DB server. So I figured it needed a little bit of automation.

First, I turned off a bunch of un-needed services which most were taken from this page. Now the vApp boots in about 1 minute exactly. A much better turn around time. This time doesn't include customizations which takes another reboot. So calculate 1:30-2 minutes for total boot time.

I have compiled a list of free VMware vSphere tools that any administrator can use. I even made a Top 10 list out of that. But what about some more advanced tasks?

Look no further. I've created a collaboration of, yet again, FREE TOOLS for virtual machines within your VMware environment. All of the tools in this package were pooled together for performing advanced tasks to optimize performance, reclaim lost space, and clean up your virtual machine. The goal of this project was to mount the ISO to your VM and run the scripts or tools that are packaged. Of course not all of these tools will run from a VM, but most can. I do not want to take any credit for any of the programs or scripts packaged. I simply took the time to place all of them in one spot. Take a moment to thank the creators of scripts and programs that I have linked within every ReadMe in every folder.

I thought the whole time i knew what I was doing when it came to building templates. I think this is a very important step to NEVER forget if you plan on using Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7 (have not tried this with 2012 or 8 and all documentation does not exist for it yet).

This bug bit me hard this week. I'm planning out multiple SRM testing environments. My goal was to build a single vApp, and clone it a few times. Each clone will keep the same IP addresses and I will only have one environment on at a time to do testing. Of course, this would all be fine within vCD, but I took the old school route.

I have my vCenter/SQL/SRM server all on a single 2008 R2 VM. When I cloned this VM, the IP address didn't stay the same. in fact, a new vmxnet3 adapter was added to the VM and the old one was never found. No big deal, right? I'll go ahead and assign the same IP address to the new adapter. Once I did that I ended up with the dreaded error message "The IP address XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX you have entered for this network adapter is already assigned to another adapter Name of adapter. Name of adapter is hidden from the network and Dial-up Connections folder because it is not physically in the computer or is a legacy adapter that is not working. If the same address is assigned to both adapters and they become active, only one of them will use this address. This may result in incorrect system configuration. Do you want to enter a different IP address for this adapter in the list of IP addresses in the advanced dialog box?" as seen in Microsoft KB 269155.

I was following along this blog that showed me step by step how to setup vSphere Replication with SRM - SRM 5 vSphere Replication – how to install and configure. And I got down towards the end where I have to Configure the VRMS Connection. During my setup attempts I kept getting this error: "VRM Server generic error. Please check the documentation for any troubleshooting information. The detailed exception is: 'Unexpected status code: 404'."

This led me to this VMware communities post: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/330733

I followed along with the suggested work around to use FQDN vs IP in the configuration setup and that still didn't work for me. I use DNS in my home lab because I'm a good sysadmin. But for some reason I kept on getting this error popping. So I went into the appliance and found out that the two sites couldn't ping each other without the FQDN. If i just used the simple hostname, then it would not be able to ping. If i used FQDN, then I could ping. /etc/hosts to the rescue.

If you are having a problem with getting these two pairing to work, then DO NOT sit there and remove the appliance and rebuild it 4x like i did. simply edit the hosts file of each VM and add the vCenter servers of both sides. To do so

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.