The first 2 parts of this series covered the overall vCloud Availability (vCAv) architecture and the deployment and configuration of the vCAv appliances into a Cloud Provider site. Before continuing pairing sites and configuring VM replication policies, first check that all services are online and showing as healthy. The easiest … Read more
Deployment Configuration In my lab environment I have two SP datacenter locations (Auckland and Christchurch since I’m in New Zealand) and a complete vCloud infrastructure running in each location. I have defined the appliance names and IP addresses prior to deploying vCAv and registered these in DNS prior to starting … Read more
VMware has recently released version 3.0 of vCloud Availability (vCAv) (Release Notes) which allows vCloud Service Providers to offer a variety of VM protection and migration services to their tenant customers. vCAv 3.0 combines features previously available in 3 separate VMware products (vCloud Availability Cloud-to-Cloud DR, vCloud Availability for vCloud … Read more
One of the nicest additions to the new VMware vCloud Director 9.7 release is the ability to more fully customize the tenant portal. This now includes the capability to define custom links (together with section groupings / separators) and also the capability to customize the portal (and links) on a … Read more
Introduction Application containerization with Docker is fast becoming the default deployment pattern for many business applications and Kubernetes (k8s) the method of managing these workloads. While containers generally should be stateless and ephemeral (able to be deployed, scaled and deleted at will) almost all business applications require data persistence of … Read more
Something I was not aware of until recently was that vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) has it’s own Command Line Interface (CLI) environment. This can be an invaluable tool when developing new vRO workflows and actions as it allows you to easily test expressions and code snippets in your environment. Once developed … Read more
Firstly I’ll start this off by saying that I don’t usually write opinion pieces – I’d much rather share some cool technology or tips that I’ve come across in my day job (or even playing with technology in my own time). Secondly, my perspective is likely a bit skewed – … Read more
One of the great features in vCloud Director 9 which has been further enhanced in the latest v9.5 release is the new HTML5 portal: Even better, VMware has released a toolkit to allow Service Providers to fully customise the look and feel of the portal using CSS themes in their … Read more
Bit of a quick post this, but hopefully useful to others. I got asked recently if there was an easy way to set Guest Customization options for VMs hosted in vCloud Director via Powershell/PowerCLI. It turns out there is an extremely simple way, but the syntax is a bit awkward … Read more
Since vCloud Director 8.10 VMware have allowed VMs to be created which have multiple disks using different storage policies. This can be very useful – for example, a database VM might have it’s database on fast storage but another disk containing backups or logs on slower/cheaper disk. When trying to … Read more