Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vcd

vCD Allocation Models – the vCD 1.5 update

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My post on vCloud Director Allocations Models back in September 2010 has always done fairly well in terms of view/visits. Lately I have been receiving some offline questions about how valid this article still is with vCloud Director 1.5 so I decided to go through the same exercise here. Instead of doing a full copy I will just copy and paste the characteristics section for each of the three different Allocation Models. For those who can’t be bothered the short summary is, nothing has changed… I only discovered something which I did not notice the first time around.

Allocation Pool

No changes have been introduced with vCloud Director 1.5 compared to 1.0 for the “Allocation Pool” allocation model. Below are the characteristics of this allocation model and the resource pool / vm construct used on the vSphere layer:

  • Pool of resources of which a percentage will be guaranteed
    • A reservation will be set to guarantee resources on a resource pool level
    • By default the resource pool reservations on CPU is 0% and memory 100%
    • Tenant has a guaranteed set of resources and has the ability to burst to the upper limit
    • The resource pool is not expandable!
  • VM Level characteristics
    • No reservations or limits set on a per VM level for CPU
    • Reservations set on a per VM level for memory. This reservation is based on the percentage of guaranteed resources.

Pay-As-You-Go

Nothing has changed for Pay-As-You-Go either. I slightly changed the wording though to make it more obvious what happens on a vSphere layer:

  • Percentage of resources guaranteed on a per VM level
    • A reservation and a limit will be set on a VM level
    • By default the VM reservation on CPU is 0% and memory 100%
    • By default the vCPU speed is set to 0.26GHz, which means you vCPU will be limited to 0.26GHz
  • The Org vDC resource pool is just an accumulation of all reservations set on a per VM level
    • Note that this will include the memory overhead per VM!
    • The resource pool is set to expandable

Reservation Pool

When looking at the vSphere layer it appears that not much has changed. The characteristics are still the same from a Resource Pool and virtual machine perspective… However I spotted something which was apparently already part of vCoud Director 1.0 but somehow I missed this. vCloud Director 1.x offers you the capability to add a reservation for CPU and memory and even allows you customize the shares! None of the other allocation models allow you to do this!

  • Fully guaranteed pool of resources
    • A reservation will be set to guarantee resources on a resource pool level
    • A limit will be set equal to the reservation
  • No reservations or limits set on a per VM level for CPU
    • Note that is is possible to set a reservation/limit for CPU or Memory with vCloud Director 1.x on a per VM level. See screenshot below, this is configurable on a per virtual machine basis!

 

vCloud Director Appliance Password

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Although this is documented on page 59 of the excellent Evaluators Guide I figured it wouldn’t hurt to write a tiny blog post. I found myself googling for it multiple times already with no succes, so there must be more people facing that “problem”. Below you can find the passwords of the vCloud Director Appliance and the embedded database, just in case you need it:

  • VMware vCloud Director Appliance:
    username = root
    password = Default0
  • VMware vCloud Director Appliance/Oracle Database 11g R2 XE instance:
    username = vcloud
    password = VCloud
While we are at it, these are the passwords for other appliances:
  • VMware vCenter Server Appliance:
    username = root
    password = vmware
  • VMware vShield Manager Appliance:
    username = admin
    password = default
  • vSphere Management Assistant (vMA):
    username = vi-admin
    password = <defined during configuration>
  • vSphere Data Recovery Appliance:
    username = root
    password = vmw@re
  • VMware vCenter Operations Manager
    username = admin
    password =  admin

 

Live Blog: Raising The Bar, Part V

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I am live at the Launch event in San Francisco with many other bloggers, journalists and analysts. It is the 12th of July, almost 09:00 PDT and Paul Maritz is about come up on stage to talk about the Cloud Infrastructure launch. This article will be update live during the event as we go.

Paul Maritz is taking the stage… Taking the next step in towards the more automated world.

We need to make infrastructure become something that people can depend on and focus on what is important to their business. Navigating your way forward offering a more dynamic infrastructure that will support your existing applications. Using a more flexible infrastructure, allowing people to take resources and aggregate to larger pools reducing operational costs by automating the use of these resources. More and more use of social media and use of mobile devices to connect anytime anywhere and most importantly securely.

Today we will be talking about  a more efficient infrastructure with exists of three stages IT Production, Business Production and IT as a Service. In 2009, the VI 3 era, 30% of the workloads were virtualized…. in 2010 with vSphere 4 we reached 40% and it is expected that in 2011 we will hit 50% virtualized with the majority on vSphere.

Accelerating and Amplifying business agility with vSphere 5! Not only vSphere 5 but the worlds first Cloud Infrastructure suite! In addition to vSphere 5 today we announce vSphere Site Recovery Manager 5 (Business Continuity), vCloud Director 1.5 (Policy, Reporting, Self-Service), vCenter Operations 1.0.1 (Monitoring and Management), vShield 5 (Security and Edge functionality).

VMware vCloud = Hybrid. Your private cloud experience needs to be similar to public cloud experience. VMware allows this through the vCloud offering and vCloud Service Providers. Trusted vCloud partners like Colt, Bluelock, Singtel, Verizon, NYSE Euronext, Softbank and CSC are some of the enablers for this.

Steve Herrod up on stage… I expect it is about to get more technical

Why do these new products matter and how do they fit together. Accelerating the adoption by increasing scalability. ESX 1.0 capable of 5000 IOps, ESX 2.0 ~ 7000 IOps, VI 3 100.000 IOps, vSphere 4 300.000 IOps and vSphere 5.0 1.000.000 IOps. Besides performance availability is key. Both HA and FT have been enhanced and of course SRM 5.0 has been released. Added to SRM 5.0 is vSphere Replication. vSphere Replication allows you to use the network to replicate between sites and different arrays. It will allow you to replicate more workloads with a lower costs. SRM is about datacenter mobility, not only for an outage but also pro-actively moving datacenters after an acquisition.

What does cloud computing really mean? Being able to order what you need and what without knowing what happens behind the scenes. IT will behind the scenes validate if they meet the consumers requirements. vCloud Director is all about Simple Self-Service. Deploy virtual machines but more importantly create new vApps and offer these in your own “app store”. The IT Cloud of the producer is all about offering agility. Virtualization enables automation in a way unheard in a physical environment.

Typically multiple tiers are offered within a cloud environment. The VMware Cloud Infrastructure enable you to do so. Intelligent Policy based Management is key with vCloud Director 1.5. Linked Clones is a very important feature to provision virtual machines “aggressively” within the system. It allows for fast provisiong and save up to 60% of storage.

Profile-Driven Storage and Storage DRS are part of vSphere 5.0. It enables you to map different arrays in to logical entities by a concept called a “datastore cluster” and link these to a profile. Virtual machines will be tagged with a profile and this allows you to validate compliancy. Storage DRS does for storage what DRS does for compute resources. Storage and Network IO Control ensures each virtual machine receives what it is entitled to.

For the SMB market a brand new shared storage appliance is introduced today: vSphere Storage Appliance 1.0. It takes vanilla servers and use local drives and present it as shared storage. It will bring agility and availability through shared storage to the SMB.

Auto-Deploy, PXE booting your ESXi hypervisor in to memory! It allows to spin-up more hosts within minutes instead of hours. Adding capacity has never been this simple?

vSphere 5 offers comprehensive security and isolation capabilities through vShield 5.0. vShield App 5 allows you to select regulations to protect sensitive data. It also enables you to get additional auditing in place.

The Cloud Infrastructure represents more than a million engineering hours, more than 100 additional capabilities, more than two million QA hours, more than 2000 partner certifications to enable this.

Rick Jackson up next discussing licensing.

Industry has traditionally licensed on physical constraints. It makes it difficult to create a cloud environment. Customers need to be able to upgrade to new hardware without having physical boundaries. No more “Cores per Proc” limits, no more “Physical RAM per host license”… vSphere introducing vRAM entitlement. Virtual RAM is the amount of virtual memory configured for a powered on virtual machine. vSphere 5 used pooled vRAM across the entire environment.

Packaging has been simplified and moving from 6 down to 5 packages. vSphere Advanced has been eliminated, all customers currently using Advanced are entitled to vSphere Enterprise.

Join us at VMworld for more details around the new product releases. 10AM virtual show, be there for more technical in-depth details!

Binding a vCloud Director Provider vDC to an ESX Host?

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One of our partners was playing around with vCloud Director and noticed that they could create a Provider vDC and link it directly to an ESX Host. vCloud Director did not complain about it so they figured it would be okay. However it is a requirement for vCloud Director to have DRS. One of the reasons for this being is the fact that vCloud Director leverages resource pools to ensure tenants receive what they are entitled to.

But back to the issue, they created the Provider vDC and went on to create an Org vDC and even that worked fine… Next stop was the “Organization Network. In order to create one you will need to select a network pool at some point and for some weird reason that didn’t work. After some initial emailing back and forth I noticed they didn’t select a cluster or resource pool but an ESX host. After creating a new Provider vDC based on a vSphere Resource Pool all of a sudden everything started working. Although I cannot really say why it is exactly this part that causes an issue, I can tell you that DRS is a hard requirement and not just  a suggestion!

vCloud Director Demo, creation of an Organization and its resources

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At the Dutch VMUG I presented two sessions. One was about HA/DRS and the other was about vCD. The vCD session contained a live demo and as a backup I decided to record the demo just in case for instance the internet connect would go down. The video shows the creation of an Organization, Org vCD, Org Network and of course a vApp. I didn’t want the video to go to waste so I decided to share it with all of you. I hope you will enjoy it.