On Reddit, someone asked what DRS advanced setting IsClusterManaged does and if it is even legit. I can confirm it is legit, it is a setting which was introduced to prevent customers from disabling DRS while the cluster is managed by vCloud Director for instance. As disabling DRS would lead to deleting resource pools, which would be a very bad situation to find yourself in when you run vCloud Director as it leans on DRS Resource Pools heavily. So if you see the advanced setting IsClusterManaged in your environment for DRS, just leave it alone, it is there for a reason. (Most likely because you are using something like vCloud Director…)
vcd
Upgrade vCloud Director 1.5 on vSphere 5.1 to vCD 5.1.1?
One of my colleagues, Matthew Meyer, posted a list of cool videos he produced. These videos show how to upgrade vCloud Director 1.5 on vSphere 5.0 to vCloud Director 5.1.1 running on vSphere 5.1. Nice right?! Thanks Matt for creating these, awesome work. (I normally don’t use the “read more” option, but as there are 8 videos in total I will only show two on the front page. Hit “Continue Reading” if you want to see the rest!)
VMware vCenter Server 5.0 to 5.1 Upgrade
VMware vCenter Single Sign-On Installation
[Read more…] about Upgrade vCloud Director 1.5 on vSphere 5.1 to vCD 5.1.1?
VMFS File Sharing Limits increased to 32
I was reading this white paper about VMware View 5.1 and VMFS File Locking today. It mentions the 8 host cluster limitation for VMware View with regards to linked clones and points to VMFS file sharing limits as the cause for this. While this is true in a way, VMware View 5.1 is limited to 8 host clusters for linked clones on VMFS Datastores, the explanation doesn’t cover all details or reflect the current state of vSphere / VMFS. (Although there is a fair bit of details in there about VMFS prior to vSphere 5.1.)
What the paper doesn’t mention is that in vSphere 5.1 this “file sharing limit” has been increased from 8 to 32 for VMFS Datastores. Cormac Hogan wrote about this a while ago. So to be clear, VMFS is fully capable today of sharing a file with 32 hosts in a cluster. VMware View doesn’t support that yet unfortunately, but for instance VMware vCloud Director 5.1 does support it today.
I still suggest reading the white paper, as it does help getting a better understanding of VMFS and View internals!
Database clustering support for vCloud Director added in version 5.1!
Those who have been architecting vCloud Director environments from the early days know that this has always been a pain point. I personally have had many discussions with product management and engineering to get support for database clustering like Oracle RAC or Microsoft clustering services for MS SQL. Unfortunately neither 1.0 and 1.5 supported it. So the big questions always was, when will database clustering support for vCloud Director be added?
I had a couple of discussions around this again last week and noticed it was still not listed until someone pointed me to the vCAT 3.0 documents. Hidden on page 110 of document “3a Architecting a VMware vCloud.pdf” I found the following statement:
VMware vCloud component database resiliency is provided through database clustering. Microsoft Cluster Service for SQL and Oracle RAC are supported.
Yes I do realize that this is not a KB article, or even mentioned in the vCloud Director documentation. I have requested the docs to be revised and a KB to be created. Hopefully those will follow soon, for now this statement is all we needed! When the docs are revised or a KB is published I will add the references to this article.
<update – 18/Oct/2012> KB just got added – http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2037802 </update>
Demo time – vCloud Director 5.1 disaster recovery demo
When I was playing with the new vCloud Director 5.1 and Site Recovery Manager 5.1 I figured I would record a demo of the DR solution that Chris Colotti and I developed. The demo is fairly straight forward and hopefully helps you in the process of building a resilient cloud infrastructure. In this demo I have included:
- vSphere 5.1
- vSphere Replication
- vCloud Director 5.1
- Site Recovery Manager 5.1