In part 1 and part 2 of this series I detailed an overview of VMware vCloud Director Extender (CX) and the configuration from a Service Provider perspective to configure their platform to support CX. This third article in the series details the configuration steps required for a tenant/customer environment to … Read more
In the first part of this series of articles I described the new vCloud Director Extender (CX) software released by VMware. In this article I will show the steps required to install and configure the software from a Cloud Provider perspective. Included in this will be the necessary network and … Read more
Last week VMware released version 1.0 of the new vCloud Director Extender (CX) (link to documentation set). This provides some extremely flexible options for customers to migrate servers to/from a vCloud service provider cloud platform, including the use of L2VPN to transparently stretch their on-premise networks to the cloud provider. … Read more
Since vCloud Director v9 was released last week (and previously as part of the closed beta), one of the new features I’m most excited about is support for multi-site deployments. This allows vCloud Director environments for the first time to properly span federated sites (e.g. a tenant who has resources … Read more
Yesterday I wrote about the PowerShell module I’ve written (CIDisk.psm1) to allow manipulation of independent disks in a vCloud environment. This post shows some usage options and details some of the caveats to be aware of when using disks in this manner. My test environment has two VMs (named imaginatively … Read more
Another day, another customer requirement which I figured ‘this will be easy’ and turned out not to be quite so easy… The customer in question is a tenant on our cloud platform and has built a VM to be their offline root Certificate Authority (CA). In line with their security … Read more
Tom Fojta wrote a great blog post about the new capability in vCloud Director 8.10 to import running VMs into vCloud Director. This is a huge asset in migration scenarios where customers can’t afford outages when being migrated into the vCD environment. Unfortunately the API syntax to actually initiate the … Read more
Introduction While I love using the PowerCLI tools for manipulating vCloud Director, sometimes you need to perform actions that require hitting the API directly. Tools such as the RESTClient plugin for Firefox, cURL and HTTPie from the command line are good for interactive manipulation of the API, but what if … Read more
Sometimes you just need to create a new vApp with no contents at all – maybe for testing, or maybe you want to populate it with VMs built ‘from scratch’ rather than cloned from templates. This is easy to do in the vCloud Director web UI – you just skip … Read more
Way back in 2012 Alan Renouf created a PowerCLI module to deal with manipulation of metadata entries for vCloud Director objects – this can be incredibly useful to track related information for these objects. The vCD metadata functionality was enhanced in v5.1 (and then later in 5.5, 5.6 and 8.0) – in particular … Read more