Using VMware Container Service Extension (CSE)

Yesterday I wrote showing the currently available container hosting options from VMware. As we’ve recently deployed one of these options – CSE in our environment I thought it would be useful to show a sample workflow on how the service functions and how customers can use this to deploy and … Read more

vCloud Director Extender – Part 5 – Stretch Networking (L2VPN)

In this 5th part of my look into vCloud Director Extender (CX), I deal with the extension of a customer vCenter network into a cloud provider network using the L2VPN network extension functionality. Apologies that this post has been a bit delayed, turned out that I needed a VMware support … Read more

vCloud Director Extender – Part 4 – Connect to Provider & VM Migration

In the first 3 parts of this series I covered an overview of vCloud Director Extender (CX), the installation and configuration of CX at the Cloud Provider site and the installation and configuration of CX at the customer/tenant site. In this 4th part I will be covering the configuration of … Read more

vCloud Director Extender – Part 3 – Tenant Setup

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

vCloud Director Extender – Part 2 – Cloud Provider Setup

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

vCloud Director Extender – Part 1 Overview

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

vCloud Director v9 Multi-site

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

Using Independent Disks in vCloud

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

Independent Disks in vCloud via PowerCLI

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

Live import VMs to vCloud Director

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