I'm fairly new to vCenter Operations, I had a post a while back talking about vCOps being a hype, but the software is proving itself to be a market catalyst and a differentiator. My goal was to get the vCloud Director Adapter for vCOps integrated so I could see what my vCloud environment looks like.

I'll admit it, I took the hard route. This wasn't the easiest portion to get working, but I'm glad I was finally able to figure it out. When reading through the documentation technote-vCloud-Adapter.pdf it says nothing about installing the adapter on the OVA version of vCOps. Every piece of documentation talks about installing the adapters on the Windows or Linux versions when you build the OS yourself and install the software. If you didn't know, the OVA version is the model VMware wants you to use because it helps correctly align the proper RAM and vCPU requirements. I ended up giving the Windows route a shot and the installation of the plug-in is pretty simple, but the setup of vCenter Operations isn't. So let the mission begin...

This past week I spent a few days at the VCE Marlboro offices doing some lab validation. One of the topics that comes up on a regular basis is the integration of the Nexus 1000v in the Vblock Platform with the constraints of VMware's vCloud Director integration. VMware has released a patch known as vCloud Director 1.5.1 that doesn't allude to any new features of the 1000v product. My goal for the week was to see if VCD-NI and VLAN backed network pools could be automatically provisioned by vCloud Director.

The first test was to try and validate vCloud Director 1.5.1 with vShield Manager 5.0.1 and the current Vblock Certification Matrix 2.5.3 that uses Cisco Nexus 1000v 4.2(1)SV1(5.1), which is the supported version of Nexus 1000v that can do VXLAN among other things. The VCE 2.5.3 certification matrix also uses VMware vSphere Hypervisor ESXi 5.0 Builds 474610, 504890, 515841 and VMware vCenter Server 5.0 build 455964. The Certification Matrix is a very valuable piece to customers because it validates the software and firmware levels of all the components in a Vblock to guarantee integration and compatibility so the customer doesn't have to assume the risk of testing upgrades and releases, which can be a time consuming task for many environments.

Our test used ESXi build 515841 and vCenter 455964. These builds are normal vSphere 5.0 and NOT Update 1. After getting vCloud Director setup, we need to follow the directions lined out in Configuring Network Segmentation Manager. Of course, nothing is as spoon fed as I would like, so here is a step by step tutorial.

VCE, along with Cisco, EMC, and VMware, are doing a 13 City US tour they are calling next generation data center.

I will actually be participating in the Cincinnati, OH and Nashville, TN sessions and perhaps one or two more surprise appearances. These sessions will kick off with a very brief high level overview and be followed by a round table or panel discussion. You will get to hear where VCE was, where we are today, and what's being planned for 2012, 2013 and beyond. This is a great way for you to not be bored by powerpoint and actually get to ask any question that has been on your mind. At the end of the session, you will hopefully get a better understanding of the impact of converged infrastructure and how your organization may need to change its current IT procurement process.

The list of cities is below and you can register here at http://www.nextgenerationdatacenter.com/ . I hope to see you there.

Check the latest release:

How To Install vCloud Director on RHEL 6.2 - No GUI

I check my website statistics to see why people visit my website. Often times, there is a google search for "how to install vCloud Director" and it points to my SQL installation. There isn't a good spoon feeding step-by-step guide so I figured it was about time. I'm all about some good help and I love detailed instructions. So I'm trying to build the complete guide.

This is going to be a semi-long post because the process of doing most of these tasks are pretty well documented, but not screen capped. I'm also giving credit to the authors of many of these steps because it's what I use personally to do installs. I am not going to cover design considerations or anything the pertains to the operations of vCloud Director.

I would suggest downloading this document now because it's key to have and know parts of this. VMware vCloud Installation and Configuration Guide 1.5

Step 1. (Optional) Create a vApp for your vCloud Director Management VMs. I say this is optional because some people would prefer not to worry about the resource being a factor. I like to put all my vCloud Management VMs in a vApp because I can then control the startup and shutdown policy to make sure everything is brought up in a consistent manner. I only use this in my home lab, do not use for production use.

It's short notice I know, but if anyone is local to the Wichita, Kansas area, I'll be speaking at Alexander Open Systems Partner Event called Data Center in a Box. I'll be talking about the VCE Vblock Platform value proposition along with solutions, management, and orchestration. It should be interesting and fun if you are still relatively new to VCE and Vblocks. Heck, even if you think you know VCE, come listen to all the goodies we are working on internally. We're more than just a converged infrastructure solution now.

Here is a quick description:

Data Center in a Box

Location: Wichita, KS

Date: Wednesday, Mar 14, 2012

Event Overview

It's time for another grand giveaway from kendrickcoleman.com! I have more gear and swag this time so get ready to cast your entry.

First off, THANK YOU, the readers of my blog. If it weren't for you, I wouldn't have the sponsorships and the will to continuously put out new stuff. Second, Thank you TrainSignal for your support and for donating some of the best content around. If you don't win the contest, you should be purchasing TrainSignal Training DVDs anyway because the content is just unreal and it comes from amazing smart people.

This was something i've been wanting to play around with for a while. vCloud Director has the ability to do some customizations so you can help brand your vCloud portal. After playing around with it for an hour, I was able to build myself a new color customized portal view. It's kind of cool and pretty simple. Here is a KB article called Customizing the vCloud Director User Interface Using CSS. From here, i downloaded the cloud-director-template.css and started changing around HEX color codes. It took a while to figure out what color code changed what because sometimes nothing at all would be changed. It's still pretty buggy, and doesn't really let you customize everything. I wanted to customize the arrows on the top left, as well as the blue highlighter when scrolling over the datagrids and the left menu, and some links, but I'm sure it will come in time.

I wanted to create a feel that is comparable to my website so it feels like there is some correlation. If you want my template, you can download it here or at the bottom of this page:

I was with a customer the other day and and they asked me to go more in-depth with lease times. To be honest, my initial thought process was incorrect and I want to dive a bit more in-depth on some configurations. This will hopefully make you understand how lease times work with vCloud Director.

As a cloud admin, it's always a recommended practice to create an organization that aligns with something for your internal IT/Administrators. Having an internal org is necessary because you only want a select few organizations actually creating public catalogs for consumption across the vCloud. For instance, in my very own vCloud instance, I created an organization called KendrickColeman that gives me the ability to publish public catalogs. You wouldn't want tenants of the vCloud publishing vApps to other tenants.