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.

Today I went and took my VCP5 certification exam and passed. Thanks to all my fellow twitterati for the resounding congratulations. While VCP5 is still a great certification to have and I'm happy that I passed, I honestly didn't want to take the test. Here's why...

Around 6 months ago, I passed both my VCAP4-DCA and VCAP4-DCD. These were two exams I was psyched about passing. I spent about 3 months preparing and by passing those two exams, I'm only one giant leap away from doing a VCDX defense. I'm not going for a VCDX at this time, but that's not the point. The point is that by going higher up in the certification stack, the certification renewal process should be easier. VMware has the right thought in mind that if I pass VCP4, and then pass a VCAP4-DCA, if I take my VCAP5-DCA, it will automatically renew my VCP4 to a VCP5. To bad that's not what is happening in reality for many test takers...

Someone at VMware has figured out how to play the certification game by making VCDXs go and take a VCP test. It's completely bogus, IMO. You will never see a Cisco CCIE be pressured to go and take their entry level CCNA exam would you?

When a customer is deploying a Vblock Infrastructure Platform with VMware View or VMware vCloud Director, there is a consistent message that always arises, where do they run the virtual management infrastructure stack? View and vCloud come up on a regular basis, but this article focuses on any application that utilizes the Vblock as resources for a particular stack of virtual machines that comprise a Virtual Management Infrastructure Stack. This article is heavy on VMware design and I will be discussing what options are available to you to run a Virtual Management Infrastructure Stack and will make you think about your overall comfort with a solution.

To set the scene, take a look at these diagrams. I have created both a View and vCloud diagram that depict what we are trying to accomplish. In every management stack, there are a multitude of different VMs that make an application function.

In a VMware vCloud Director environment for Vblock, you will usually have these VMs (not all are required):

• 1 vCenter Server for Management Components
• 1 vCenter Server for vCloud Resources (optional but best practice)
• 2 Database Servers SQL/Oracle (1 required, 2 optional)
• 1 vShield Manager VM (can run in Fault Tolerant mode)
• 2-X vCloud Director Nodes. The amount of nodes depends on size of vCloud environment and level of redundancy
• 2-X Virtual Supervisor Modules for Nexus 1000v. The amount of VSMs depends on vCloud Size
• 1 VMware vCenter Chargeback Server
• 1 vCenter Orchestrator Server
• 1 RabbitMQ Server
• 1 Load Balancer
• and more…

As everyone knows, the Top 25 virtualization blog voting machine is now open for business. This is NOT another "vote for me" post. I don't want to act like a selfish single child who needs more attention. Instead, this post is to encourage you to just go vote. More and more virtualization blogs are popping up everyday and these individuals put in a lot of work into sharing their knowledge with the world. Bloggers spend more time than you would think whiteboarding ideas or taking tons of screenshots to show you step by steps to spark your interests. It's almost a second job to many.

There is a great quote from the movie Contagion that i find amusing "Blogging is not writing, it's just graffiti with punctuation." There are so many blogs out there that it's very hard to find the few golden nuggets out of the mess written on the walls. The best blogs are consistently the best because they have the greatest content and make it amusing and fun for their readers. You only get 10 votes, so sort through the 100+ blogs, and choose the ones that consistently bring you back to want and read more. It means a lot to get votes from readers. I always love reading the emails that start with "Hey Kenny, i was reading your blog and..."

Someone call the n00b patrol because this one should have been a no-brainer. I was working with a customer today and their default image inside of vCloud Director is a Windows 2008 R2 VM with 1vCPU and 4GB of RAM. Whenever they deployed a new VM from vCloud Director, it would take approximately 45 minutes to complete the entire sysprep process and boot up. After that 45 minute process, when they tried to use that VM, it was almost unbearable through the web UI because it was so slow. The CPU performance was just outright horrible.

After a few quick conversations, I did a bit of troubleshooting to narrow it down to a vCloud problem. I used the same exact image and deployed it from template on a blade used for vCloud resources. It also deployed on the same datastore so we could cancel out the hardware issue. Sysprep ran, and the VM was created and ready for use after 4-7 minutes. So it was definitely a problem in vCloud.

I opened up the vSphere Client to the vCloud vCenter and started looking at the VM that was spun up from vCloud Director under the resources tab. This should have been as clear as day to point out. The VM has a limit set on it of 260MHz.

So the title is technically inaccurate. Everything has to traverse a VLAN, and if no VLAN is specified, then you're riding on VLAN 1.

I volunteered to build some Hands On Labs for our technical sales folks and I was in charge of creating the Nexus 1000v Lab. After battling a few quirks for about 7 hours, I was finally able to get everything functioning correctly. The networking piece didn't take 7 hours, but the lab was convoluted enough that I will save you from reading about it.

The lab consisted of running the latest software:

• vCenter 5 Build 455964
• 2x Nested ESXi Servers running 5.0 Build 504890
• Nexus 1000v VSM 4.2(1) SV1(4a)
• Nexus 1000v VEM 201108271-BG

another webinar about free tools??! oh yeah! David Davis and I are once again presenting our infamous VMworld presentation. I don't have to talk about it any more. Just know that since this is being sponsored by TrainSignal there will be some vSphere 5 Training Give Aways, which is always fun.

It's taking place on Wednesday 1/11/2012 at 3:00pm EST. Hope to see you there!

Register Here! - download here