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…)
vcloud director
Tour through VMware vCloud Hybrid Service part 1
Last week I received an account for the VMware vCloud Hybrid Services through one of our internal teams. I wanted to play around with it just to see what it can do and how things work, but also to see what the user experience was like, basically a tour through VMware vCloud Hybrid Service. I received my username and a link to set a password via email and it literally took 3 seconds to get started after setting that password. First I was presented with was a screen that showed the regions I had to my disposal as shown below, 4 regions.
You may wonder why that matters, well it is all about availability… Of course each region individually will have done everything there is to be done when it comes to resiliency but what if a whole site blows up? Well that is where multiple regions come in to play. I just want to deploy a small virtual machine for now so I am going to select a random site… I will use Virginia. [Read more…] about Tour through VMware vCloud Hybrid Service part 1
Automating vCloud Director Resiliency whitepaper released
About a year ago I wrote a whitepaper about vCloud Director resiliency, or better said I developed a disaster recovery solution for vCloud Director. This solution allows you to fail-over vCloud Director workloads between sites in the case of a failure. Immediately after it was published various projects started to implement this solution. As part of our internal project our PowerCLI guru’s Aidan Dalgleish and Alan Renouf started looking in to automating the solution. Those who read the initial case study probably have seen the manual steps required for a fail-over, those who haven’t read this white paper first…
The manual steps in the vCloud Director Resiliency whitepaper is exactly what Alan and Aidan addressed. So if you are interested in implementing this solution then it is useful to read this paper new white paper about Automating vCloud Director Resiliency as well. Nice work Alan and Aidan!
Stretched vCloud Director infrastructure
A while back I wrote about design considerations when designing or building a stretched vCloud Director infrastructure. Since then I have been working on a document in collaboration with Lee Dilworth, and this document should be out soon hopefully. As various people have asked for the document I decided to throw it in to this blog post so that the details are already out there.
** Disclaimer: this article has not been reviewed by the technical marketing team yet, this is a preview of what will possibly be published. When the official document is published I will add a link to this article **
Introduction
VMware vCloud® Director™ 5.1 (vCloud Director) gives enterprise organizations the ability to build secure private clouds that dramatically increase datacenter efficiency and business agility. Coupled with VMware vSphere® (vSphere), vCloud Director delivers cloud computing for existing datacenters by pooling vSphere virtual resources and delivering them to users as catalog-based services. vCloud Director helps you build agile infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud environments that greatly accelerate the time-to-market for applications and responsiveness of IT organizations.
Resiliency is a key aspect of any infrastructure but is even more important in “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS) solutions. This solution overview was developed to provide additional insight and information in how to architect and implement a vCloud Director based solution on a vSphere Metro Storage Cluster infrastructure.
Architecture Introduction
This architecture consists of two major components. The first component is the geographically separated vSphere infrastructure based on stretched storage solution, here after referred to as the vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) infrastructure. The second component is vCloud Director.
Note – Before we dive in to the details of the solution we would like to call out the fact that vCloud Director is not site aware. If incorrectly configured availability could be negatively impacted in certain failure scenarios.
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
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