vCloud Availability 3.0 – On-Premise Deployment & Configuration

In the first 3 parts of this series I detailed the configuration and deployment of vCAv 3.0 into a service provider site. In this 4th part I show the deployment and configuration of vCAv into a tenant on-premise infrastructure. This allows appropriately configured tenants to protect on-premise VMs to a … Read more

vCloud Availability 3.0 – Site Pairing & vCAv Policies

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

vCloud Availability 3.0 – Cloud Deployment & Configuration

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

vCloud Availability 3.0 – Introduction

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

vCloud Director 9.7 Portal Customization

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

Dynamic Persistent Volumes with CSE Kubernetes and Ceph

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

vCloud Director 9 HTML5 Portal Customization

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

VM Guest Customization in vCloud Director via PowerCLI

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

Getting detailed VM Disk Properties from the vCloud API

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