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Part 69: My vCloud Journey Journal – vCenter Setup with vCloud Automation Center 5.1

20 May

In my last previous two posts on vCloud Automation Center (VC-AC or vCake if you prefer) I looked at ensuring you had the pre-requisites and doing the installation itself – suitable for PoC or HomeLab. Now I want to turn my focus to how you configure vCAC to speak to vCenter – vCAC has the ability to provision to whole host of resources – virtual, physical and cloud. But I imagine in the first instance it will be to vSphere that you might first turn.

With a clean installation there’s a couple of admin constructs to put together before you can deploy your first VM. These are:

  • Credentials – These are the usernames/passwords used to authenticate to the resource. Interesting they held separately from the actual adding of the resource itself. 
  • Endpoints – These are where the URLs or FQDNs of the resources are held, and once you’ve typed in the URL for the vCenter, you select the credentials you established earlier. That’s an interesting separation - because if your provisioning resources – vSphere, HyperV, Xen – use the same domain username/password to gain access – the credentials could be re-used. I bet in the real world were people have a hybrid sources for provisioning they have different username/password for additional security. Rather than one ring to rule them all.
  • Install an Agent – Dependent on the resource in question – you will need to install an agent on the vCAC server to communicate through to the resource. vCAC has one single agent setup.exe – from within which you use radio buttons to select which resource you’re connecting to.
  • Enterprize Group – This is system wide container that you can use to pull in existing VMs, vApps, Templates – and then advertise them to business units within the vCAC instance. If you know your way around vCloud Director I guess its akin to having an Org that just contains catalog which is then published to all other Orgs. I think the way vCAC does this is neater – because to do this in vCD you need to create an Org and a OrgvDC just to make collection of vApps available to every other Org in the same vCD instance – which seems somewhat contrived configuration – a workaround rather than by design. Just sayin’
  • Machine Pre-fixes – This is one of the methods vCAC has for naming VMs, and it kinda reminds me a little like VMware Horizon View method of naming VMs in a virtual desktop pool – it allows prefix piece of text followed by a numbering mechanism to create machines with a naming convention like corphq001, corphq002 and so on which is fine for quick provisioning tests.
  • Provisioning Group – Are method of controlling who has access to which resources by assigning AD groups to vCAC roles such as Manager, Support or User roles. Using these provisioning groups you can assign the Machine Prefixes and AD DSN Values to control users/groups can be added. Once created you assign allocations of number of VMs, CPU%, Memory% and Storage allocations using reservations.
  • Reservations – As you would expect you can create reservations in vCAC and assign them to provisioning groups – the important thing here is unlike with say vCloud Director – tis doesn’t create resource pools on the VMware HA/DRS clusters. These reservations/allocations are monitored and tracked by vCAC – so if they are meet its vCAC that prevents them from being exceeded. If you like vCAC becomes the source of admission control to the tenants – although fundamentally it’s where those resources come from vSphere, vCloud Director, HyperV, Xen that decided if they are granted.
  • BluePrints – Are VMs, collections of VMs or physical definitions that actually give the tenant something to select when they need a new compute resource – they are akin to vCloud Director vApp Templates or vSphere Templates. These blueprints also have security settings so you can control if someone can connect to the compute resource with SSH, RDP and so on – as well as many other privileges and rights. BluePrints can be defined by the Enteprize Admin and made Globally Available to every provisioning group, or they can be created by the Provisioning Group Manger and made available just to its members.
  • Self-Service Portal – The core vCAC is portal in its own right which only displays the right content to the right context based on the user credentials – however, there is a much simpler self-service portal which offers a UI which might be a bit more easier on the eye.

As you can see there’s quite a bit of work to do in first setup – the savings in time come once you have consumers onboard and using the system itself. As the post title suggests my focus is on vCenter/vSphere in this instance, but I will be walking through all the other compute resource endpoints as my learning progresses…

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Chinwag with Mike Brown (@VirtuallyMikeB)

17 May


mike-brown

I first came across Mike Brown a couple of weeks ago when I was searching for some kind of skinny-linux distro to use both with Nested ESX (ESX running ESX) and for vCloud Connector – on his site I found a copy of Linux DSL which is only 32MB in memory and disk for that purpose. As someone who’d help me, I thought it was only right and proper for me to help him, and shining a light on his blog and is work with VMware technologies. Turns out we had plenty in common as he’s been working on VMware Site Recovery Manager/DR project for a while…

 
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vINCEPTION: Nested Windows 2012 HyperV on vSphere5.1

16 May

Acknowledgement:

I’d like to acknowledge Ricky El-Qasem’s blogpost on the Veeam Blog. This was written in Sept, 2011 ago as Ricky has moved on to work for canopy-cloud.com

IMPORTANT:
Of course all this is just for lab testing purposes, remember vINCEPTION or Nesting as it is more commonly known – is unsupported…

One of the thing I want to do is running Windows 2012 HyperV inside a VMware vSphere 5.1 environment. There’s couple of reasons why:

Firstly, my big project at the moment is learning vCloud Automation Center or vCAC. There’s a couple of ways round pronouncing the acronym. Some people call it VC-AC (think of how you would say AC-DC) and others I’ve heard it pronounce CAC as “cake”. So take your pick. As you might know vCAC is to some degree hypervisor and cloud agnostic – although personally I think your better of using vSphere (but hell, I would say that wouldn’t I?). So I want to learn how to setup ALL the provisioning resource types – as you can’t really go about deploying VMs/vApps without any resources to point to (although apparently with vCAC there is a way of spoofing it to think it is… which I think might be rather interesting to investigate at a later date)

Secondly, we recently released “Multi-Hypervisor Management” (MHM for short, shouldn’t that be vMHM?) so I wanted to setup a temporary nested Windows 2012 HyperV environment to test that as well.

Thirdly, it’s occurred to me that as VMware’s Senior Cloud Infrastructure Evangelist (you gotta love these US job titles!) I can’t really do that in a VMware Bubble. So its time to start looking over the fence at what others are doing – because only by seeing what these systems are like for real, and can a truly see what differentiates VMware racehorse from the also-rans. It makes sense to start with Microsoft’s offering because lets face it there are biggest Elephant in the room. But once I’m done with them, I do want to look at other vendors too such as OpenStack(s).

Of course my focus has to be VMware for reasons which I think are patently obvious – and so for that matter I didn’t want to dedicate hardware in my lab to running them. Nested seems to be there way to go, and that’s what I’m doing for internal builds of vSphere whereas in the physical world – I’m running the latest and greatest GA code. I won’t be able to draw any conclusions from a performance perspective because it will be nested, not native. My interest is really in product functionality and integration.

Now down to business. If you try to install Windows 2012 Server OS and then enable the HyperV role the GUI or via PowerCLI with the proper settings you likely to get this error message. One of the complexities around Window 2012 HyperV is how even get this far. Do you install Windows with or without a GUI front-end (or Server Core as Microsoft calls it). Plus when you look at TechNet there’s even .ISO of things called “HyperV”. Is it me or is that just unnecessarily confusing – compared to dedicated hypervisor with no graphic front-end?

Screen Shot 2013-05-01 at 10.58.17

To do this with PowerCLI on Server Core you would use:

Install-WindowsFeature Hyper-V –Restart

That cmdlet would result in similiar response:

Screen Shot 2013-05-01 at 11.03.34

Thought: Hang on! It’s a “ROLE” in the GUI, and a “FEATURE” in PowerShell. Come on Microsoft make you mind up! :-)

So to get this nesting to work we need to make some changes on the ESX hosts, and also the VM’s VMX file. Before you go any further you do realise this sort thang isn’t remotely supported. Thought so. But I thought I better say that to CYA…

STEP1: Enable VHV Allow on the ESX Host:

First you need open a console on the ESX host, and modify a text file. These way to do this is temporarily open SSH on the host, and PuTTY in. Once there’s run this command:

echo ‘vhv.allow = “TRUE” ‘ >> /etc/vmware/config

repeat and rinse for the all the remaining hosts in your cluster.

STEP2: Enable VMX Settings

Next we need to add two entries to the .VMX file called monitor.virtual_exec=hardware and hypervisor.cpuid.v0=FALSE parameters to the Nested Windows 2012 HyperV system

Screen Shot 2013-05-01 at 16.53.25

STEP3:  Ensure CPU/MMU Virtualization is engaged

Screen Shot 2013-05-01 at 16.55.29

STEP4: Add a CPU Mask:

Finally, add a CPU mask to the Level1 register on ecx

—- —- —- —- —- —- –H- —-

 Screen Shot 2013-05-01 at 16.57.08

From this point if you pCPU is of the right type be able to power on and enable the HyperV role – sadly for me my CPU still didn’t support this nested approach (although VMware ESX 5.x works perfectly fine).

Screen Shot 2013-05-01 at 18.23.27

 Conclusions:

So for me its back to the drawing board. I guess what I could do is – take 4 of my 9 servers and install Windows HyperV to two of them, and Xen to the others. It’s not ideal. My Lenovo’s at the colo don’t have the blue widget that enabled remote console access. That means scheduling a visit to the colocation facility to install to physical. Plus I didn’t really want to dedicate physical hardware to this sort of thing – just spin it on demand, and power off when I’m done…

 
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UDA 2.0 (Build 23) – Adds Support for Windows 2008, Windows 7/8 and Windows 2012

15 May

I’ve been doing some recent experimentation with nesting Microsoft Windows 2012 HyperV under vSphere5.1 – and that lead me to looking at the UDA as way of pushing out a scripted installation of Windows 2012. I had a quick word with Carl Thijssen and he very kindly put together a patch bundle to add support for Windows 2008, Windows 7/8 and Windows 2012.

Screen Shot 2013-05-15 at 12.15.13

If you run the UDA or intend to I’d highly recommend this patch. Although you might want to backup or snapshot your UDA first, just in case something goes astray during the upgrade itself. Pop along to the download page here or on ultimatedeployment.org/download.html to grab the new patch.

 
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Part 68: My vCloud Journey Journal – Installing vCloud Automation Center 5.1 (HomeLab)

02 May
Factory_Automation_Robotics_Palettizing_Bread

This is picture of what real “automation” looks like…

Acknowledgement: I should thank Adam Bohle and Kim Ranyard who have been unofficially supporting me, and helping me. Without Adam and Kim’s assistance over the last couple of days this blog post wouldn’t have been possible. Thanks guys!

Previously, I spent an entire post just talking about meeting the pre-requisites for an installation of vCAC. By the end of the process I now have two setups – one that’s fully-distributed and product like with multiple Windows instances for the different vCAC roles – and another I’m calling “Uber-vCAC” which is one big Windows instance that will do the whole shooting match. I wanted to try both types of install – because I know the 1st one would be done in production and the second one would be done in a homelab. I must admit creating the Uber-vCAC was very easy. I guess it just shows that in IT once you have done a task more than two or three times it becomes second nature to you, and feels qualitative easier.

Now that I happy that all those pre-requisities have been met I think I’m ready to proceed to the installation part. As ever you need permissions and rights in order to install anything into Windows. That means what ever account you use it must have “Local Administrator” rights. I guess this is why so much software gettings installed using the credentials of the Domain Admin in our world. To be bit more specific the user rights that stuck out for me in reading the install guide were:

  • Manager Service Install – needs at least DBO privileges to the vCAC Database.
  • Manager Service Install – if you need to authorise users to Active Directory, the Manager Service user must have rights to the “Windows Authorisation Access” group on the Domain

For this reason I created an “vCAC-Admin” account with the appropriate rights including membership of the groups. It was this account I used for the local login for the installation.

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The vCloud Suite Digest (Apr, 2013) with Pang Chen and Mike Laverick

01 May

With contributions from our esteemed colleagues:

Massimo Re Ferre, Eric Fulton, Tomas Fojta, Ray Budavari, Jesse Schachter, Kyle Smith, Francois Misiak, Benham Chia, Ranga Maddipudi, Trevor Gerdes and Ben Byer.

In this month digest we focus on both vCloud Director and vCNS Edge Gateway questions and answers including:

  • vCloud Director:
    • Guest OS Clustering
    • vApps with VMs spanning clusters
    • IP Masquerade in vCD 5.x
    • Changes in networking when upgrading from vCD 1.5 to 5.1
    • Increasing vCD Cell Performance
    • Partially powered on VMs and Licensing
  • vCNS
    • 3rd Party VPN Support
    • High Availablity for the Edge Gateway
    • Edge Gateway Storage Placement
    • Edge Gateway and Physical Equipment

 

 

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UK Northeast England VMUG Meeting – 6th June

30 Apr

It’s with great pleasure and pride to say that I will speaking at the UK Northeast England VMUG Meeting on the 6th June. It will be nice to supporting my local area (kind of) where I was born and bred (well, actually I’m Teessider, not a Tynesider, but I guess that’s better than being a Mackem right?). I will probably go up North the night before and kip with my parents, before heading up to Newcastle in the morning. Plan to check into a local hotel so I can stay on for the vBeers – before toddling back home the following morning.

Might pop on Owa Mam for a lunch time Parmo…

We kick off at 12.30pm at:

CastleGate
Simpson Room
Melbourne Street
Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 2JQ
Directions

Here’s the Agenda so far:

  • Networking and Lunch
  • Cisco Presentation: How Cisco Do IT
    • Meet Richard Gore who will discuss how Cisco deployed VMware in their environment as the first step toward deploying private cloud, IaaS and PaaS in Cisco production data centers.Rich is a Cisco IT senior manager with 14 years’ experience in Cisco IT infrastructure architecture. He has 30 years of IT experience at Bell Labs, AT&T, as a private consultant and now with Cisco IT.
  • User Presentation: Virtualising SQL instances
    • Rod Hope from BSkyB (and Scottish VMUG) will give a presentation on his real world experiences virtualising SQL Server. Rod has over 13 years’ experience working with some of the world’s largest investment / investment services banks and has recently joined BSkyB’s Operations Engineering group in an Infrastructure Designer role.
  • VMware Presentation: “DR and the Cloud – To, From, Of” 
    • Meet Mike Laverick (for it is I) who will discuss the challenges of doing DR to the cloud, from the cloud and of the cloud. Mike spent several years as an instructor and blogger, and written several books on topics such as vSphere 4, SRM and View, he joined VMware as an employee last year.
  • Q&A and Wrap-Up: Raffle and Interactive Feedback: Bring Your Own Device. We’ve been using an App to ask the audience so far but if the Wi-Fi lets us down we’ll go old school and ask for show of hands on what you’d like for forthcoming topics.
  • vBeers: Join us in a local pub, The Bridge Hotel, for a drink courtesy of our sponsors Nimble Storage

I’d really recommend Rod’s session – as I know him well from the Scottish VMUG…

REGISTER NOW!

 
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Part 67: My vCloud Journey Journal: vCloud Connector 2.0 and the VMware Cloud Service Evaluation

30 Apr

vCloud Connector 2.0 and the VMware Cloud Service Evaluation

One source for Service Provider would be VMware’s very own Cloud Service Evaluation – which is currently in beta. The evaluation is just recently been upgraded to vCloud Director 5.1 and support vCloud Connector 2.0. I think there was originally some confusion. From the start the “vCloud Server Evaluation” wasn’t intended as production grade hosted experience – its merely intended as taster of how vCloud Director works. However, when we announced our intention build our own Hybrid Cloud solution – the two became conflated with each other. So on the day of the announcement many people thought this eval was the Hybrid Cloud – when it was just announcement – a statement of intent. Sadly, the poor evaluation got pretty hammered in this time. I guess the good intention was try and get our naming ducks in a row, but people were confused about to two different initiatives if I can call them that.

The sign-up process for the VMware Cloud Evaluation  is nice slick affair – usual suspects apply and there’s SMS PIN validation of the sign-up process which I rather like nowadays – you’ll need a credit card handy. I would recommend digging out your corporate company credit card. That’s what I did. Please don’t tell Jeff my manager. Okay? Fortunately, my friends over in the vCloud Evaluation provided me with a voucher number – so I have some credit already…

I’ve already written posts about the setup of the vCloud Connector private use already, as well as documenting the setup with a public provider like Stratogen, as well the process of copying, content sync and stretched deploy – so I won’t repeat myself.

There is PDF guide that walks you through Cloud with specific emphasis on vCloud Connector, and page 17 is where the document begins to talk about using the Cloud Evaluation with vCloud Connector:

Getting Started with vCloud Connector in the VMware Cloud Evaluation

1. The first step is to create a new user specifically to be used by the vCloud Connector itself. This can be be done under the “Administration” tab by clicking the “Add A User” button. This user must be an Organization Administrator – and no you cannot use the “admin” account generated during the sign-up process – and used as the primary login to the VMware Cloud Evaluation.

Screen-Shot-2013-04-11-at-14.53.44

In my case I found the vccnode account was already there. That’s because I’ve been on the eval for a while, and it was default user (albeit disabled). The documentation now indicates you have to create this user now…

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Part 66: My vCloud Journey Journal: VMware Cloud Evaluation

29 Apr

Screen-Shot-2013-03-13-at-23.38.47

One of the things I’ve been looking at is ways the vCommunity can learn more about cloud and vCloud Director with minimal effort. After all not everyone has a homelab or colocation like I do. It’s worth saying that the physical resources required to learn more about vCloud Director are not insignificant. So it was with those thoughts in mind that I started to look at the VMware Cloud Evaluation – as a possible route in. One of the interesting things about the evaluation is that it demonstrates how a customer could wrap their own UI shell around vCloud Director, as well as or instead of exposing the native vCloud Director interface to the consumer.

The sign-up process for the eval is pretty  slick and I would  recommend  any SP who is thinking of entering this space  to take a look at this enrollment process. Along side taking essential user data, the evaluation uses SMS text messages to verify the sign-up process along with the more common email method. Its something I’ve seen banks do frequently to sign up new payees in my Internet banking.

It takes about 15mins once all the details have been taken instantiate a new cloud evaluation account. That might sounds a long time to you, but believe me this actually pretty quick – especially as I heard only a couple of weeks ago that one SP’s idea of an acceptable onboarding process was 6 months!  I guess that’s corporate compliance for you – previously it took a year – so things are getting better! The Organization name is a numerical value that is assigned along with your password when your account is created. Once logged in to your evaluation account you have the option of using a simplified UI interface or the more sophisticated vCloud Director.  The simplified evaluation UI  is on the “My Cloud” tab while on that tab you can choose to view in vCloud Director if you want to. As the OrgAdmin you have the right to create vApps and vApp Networks using the core vCloud Director interface.

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Chinwag with Angelo Luciani (@AngeloLuciani)

26 Apr


angelo

Chinwag is back! Yes, I know its been a while a combo of travel and finding it difficult to pin guests down for specific dates has been the source of the unexpected hiatus. In fact I think its the biggest chinwag-gap I’ve had since I started. This weeks chinwaggee is Angelo Luciani. He’s one of the VMUG Leaders in Toronto, and he also helped to found the Silicon Valley VMUG. His day job is with a large financial institution in Toronto – but in fact most of our chat remained on the topic of VMUGs – and how to encourage more user/member participation. It was sort of inspired by the recent blogpost I did on the subject.

For some reason the old 70′s Kung-Fo Movie gremlins were at play – so you’ll notice that ye old lip movements aren’t in synch with the sound. Not quite sure why that happened, as Skype & YouTube normally play ball. Anyway, so long as the audio is clear – what the hell…

 
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