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vmware vcloud director

vCloud Director Appliance Password

Duncan Epping · Jan 26, 2012 ·

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 = [email protected]
  • VMware vCenter Operations Manager
    username = admin
    password =  admin

 

vCloud Director Demo, creation of an Organization and its resources

Duncan Epping · Dec 10, 2010 ·

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.

vCD – Networking part 3 – Use case 2

Duncan Epping · Oct 6, 2010 ·

Part 1 explained the basic concepts of networking within vCD(VMware vCloud Director), Part 2 focussed on Network Pools and Part 3 focussed on a use case which was a vApp directly connected to an External routed Org Network. It took me a while to develop part 3 and I wasn’t sure if I could find the time to do another use case or not. I received a dozen requests for another use case so I decided to free up some time to help you guys out. Please read the other parts of this series before you start reading this part. Okay, let’s dive into those trenches.

vApp fenced to an Internal Org Network

Use case:

  1. Environments where vApps are copied and redeployed for  test and development purposes. There is no connection back to the customers datacenter to avoid any interference that could be cause by these test environments.

We will start with the basics. The flow of the network in this case will be:

vmware vCD cloud director networking logical diagram

Although only two different type of networks are used, this could of course result in multiple layers if and when for instance multiple vApp Networks are created. For the purpose of this exercise we will create a vApp with 3 VMs including two different networks. You could say you classical three-tier application.

  1. WEB = Web Frontend
  2. APP =Application Server
  3. DB = Databaser Server

As you can imagine we don’t need users accessing the Application or Database Server so these two will be on a separate network segment. The Web Frontend will need to be accessible though and it will need to be able to access both the Application and the Database Server. Logically speaking that will look as follows:

vmware vCD cloud director networking logical 3-tier app diagram

Please note that the Org Network doesn’t connect back to anything! This means that in order for you to connect to your WEB vm you will need to go through the vCD Portal! Of course you could still test if your web services are working by simply deploying a desktop VM with windows XP in the same Org. Now I can hear some of you think why not just a NAT-Routed Org Network, well that is something that would work as well, but than it would be really similar to what use case 1 provided and this is purely for educational purposes.

Creating the Networks

The first step of course is to ensure you have a Network Pool. If you haven’t already created, you can use Part 2 of this series as a reference.  I am assuming here you already have a network pool and will go straight to the Org Network, which is option 7 on the home screen.

vmware vCD cloud director networking screenshot

Now you will need to select the Org that this Network will belong to and then you can decide what type of network you will create. You can do this in either “Typical” or “Advanced” mode. Both will give you the same options but it is named slightly different and Advanced will only allow you to create 1 network at a time where with Typical you can create multiple. As we have used Typical in the previous use case we will use Advanced this time. We are going to create a fully isolated Org Network so we will select “Internal Organization Network”.

vmware vCD cloud director networking screenshot

Next up we will need to select a network pool. Now you might ask yourself why we will need one when the Org Network is completely isolated? Well we will need cross-host communication when vApp/VMs need to communicate with each other and don’t reside on the same host. Although it sounds very logical, it is often overseen that this is what a network pool does. It enables cross-host communication. In this case we will select the vCloud Network Isolation Network Pool.

vmware vCD cloud director networking screenshot

Now we will need to specify the IP details for this Org Network. These IP addresses will be consumed by the VMs that are configured to use the “static pool”, in our case that will be the vShield Edge device that is deployed as part of this Isolated Network (deployed for DHCP services etc) and the WEB virtual machine.

vmware vCD cloud director networking screenshot

Of course we will need to give it a name. I tend to use the name of the Org and the type of Org Network I created.

vmware vCD cloud director networking screenshot

Now we will need to build a vApp. As stated this vApp will contain multiple VMs.

vmware vCD cloud director networking screenshot

We will give it a name.

vmware vCD cloud director networking screenshot

And we will start adding multiple VMs to it. The WEB virtual machine will have 2 NICs as it will need to connect to a device outside of vApp and to two VMs inside of the vApp.

vmware vCD cloud director networking screenshot

The following two VMs “APP” and “DB” will be configured with a single NIC as they will only need to connect to each other, all contained within the vApp.

vmware vCD cloud director networking screenshot

vmware vCD cloud director networking screenshot

Now this is the part where we will assign specific network segments to the NICs. For WEB we will connect “NIC 0” to the Internal Org Network and NIC 1 will need to be connected to a vApp Network.

vmware vCD cloud director networking screenshot

This vApp Network however will need to be created first. Please note that this is a vApp network, so only available to those VMs which are part of this vApp! Again we will need to specify IP details for the VMs to consume.

vmware vCD cloud director networking screenshot

When we have done this and have given the vApp network a name we can connect the remaining VMs to the same network.

vmware vCD cloud director networking screenshot

Now in order to have multiple copies of the same vApp running within the Org we will select “Fenced” mode for the vApp which basically will deploy a vShield Edge device.

vmware vCD cloud director networking screenshot

I guess this diagram that vCD creates makes it a bit more clear what your vApp connectivity will look like:

vmware vCD cloud director networking screenshot

And if that isn’t enough you can also check the Maps functionality that vCenter offers. This will give you a great view of how this vApp is connected within vSphere.

vmware vCD cloud director networking screenshot

So what about that desktop? And what about if we have two copies of that vApp running? Well this is what the map would look like if when we have created these. On the middle left you will see the desktop that is used for testing the WEB VMs. Both WEB virtual machines can be accessed through the VSE device, which of course means that you will need to setup NAT, but we will leave an in-depth explanation around that for the next article.

vmware vCD cloud director networking screenshot

Summary

vCloud Director Network is really powerful, but as shown by this use case it can get very complex rather fast especially when you are using multiple layers. In this example we kept it simple by using an isolated network, an External NAT/Routed Org Network would have added another layer. Features like vCenter Maps will however make it easier to understand what has been created on the vSphere layer to enable these layers of networking, make sure you take advantage of functionality like this when exploring vCD!

vCD restart issues

Duncan Epping · Sep 30, 2010 ·

One of my readers had an issue with a vCD cell not starting correctly. He wanted to know how to monitor the progress of the startup of the daemon. You can do that very easy with the following command:

tail -f /opt/vmware/cloud-director/logs/cell.log

Now you should see status updates like the following pass by:

Application Initialization: 9% complete. Subsystem 'com.vmware.vcloud.common.core' started

At some point it should of course say “Application Initialized”. If it doesn’t the cell.log file should give a hint why it hasn’t been initialized. If for whatever reason the issue persists you could always check the “vcloud-vmware-watchdog.log” for details on the dump. There is a great KB article on this topic though, make sure you read it!

Now, what I wanted to use this article for is to document percentage where a start can get stuck and the possible issue that causes it. I have just a one to start with but hopefully this will grow overtime:

  • 9% – Possibly caused by DNS issues

RE: Migrating your VMs from vSphere to vCloud Director and vice versa

Duncan Epping · Sep 21, 2010 ·

Hany Michael wrote a nice article on importing and exporting your VMs from and to vCloud Director. Although the importing made a lot of sense the exporting from vCD and importing into vSphere in my opinion is a bit shady. It is not something I would recommend to anyone as I am unsure it is supported and I believe that vCD should be used as your management platform and not vCenter. Besides that in many environments tenants will not have direct access to vCenter to begin with. There is a simple method to export your VMs from vCloud Director in OVF Format:

  1. Power off your vApp and add it to the Catalog
  2. Select the correct catalog
  3. Open the Catalog you copied the vApp to
  4. Click “Download”

Now you can import it again in vSphere. You could keep the original vApp running in vCD if you want (when it is fenced of course as otherwise you will end up with an IP conflict) or you can completely delete it, that is up to you!

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About the author

Duncan Epping is a Chief Technologist in the Office of CTO of the Cloud Platform BU at VMware. He is a VCDX (# 007), the author of the "vSAN Deep Dive", the “vSphere Clustering Technical Deep Dive” series, and the host of the "Unexplored Territory" podcast.

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