Virtual Blog

vCloud PowerCLI scripts

David Hill — Tue, 21 May 2013 15:07:36 +0000

I have started to create this page to collate the number of growing vCloud PowerCLI scripts available. It is designed to make it easy for you to find the scripts you are looking for. If you have any scripts published on your blogs or know of any useful scripts, please leave a comment and I will add it to the list. vCloud PowerCLI scripts list Show-vCloudStats Timo Sugliani vCheck for vCloud Director Alan Renouf Install software in Isolated Machines Aidan Dalgleish Retrieving vCloud Director VM Hard Disk size Alan Renouf Simple VM reporting in vCloud with PowerCLI Jake Robinson Setting default VDSwitch security for vCloud with PowerCLI Jake Robinson Youtube – vCloud Director PowerCLI basic usage VMwareTV

Affected by the Allocation Pool changes in VCD 5.1.x? Change it back

David Hill — Thu, 16 May 2013 09:12:31 +0000

Have you been affected by the Allocation Pool changes in VCD 5.1 when you upgraded? If you have been, and are looking for a way to make this allocation model the same as in VCD 1.5, VMware has included a feature in VCD 5.1.2 that allows you to change it back to the original way it was conceived. First lets look at the changes in the Allocation Pool. Massimo ReFerre has written a great article showing the differences between the two versions of the allocation model http://it20.info/2012/10/vcloud-director-5-1-1-changes-in-resource-entitlements/ In this article he provides a comparison chart for you to easily see the differences, and gives a nice review of allocation models at the end of the article. OK but what does all this mean for me? As I am sure you are more confused than when you started reading this post… perhaps it makes sense to put a stake in the ground and underline advantages and disadvantages of the three models with vCloud Director 5.1. The PAYG model is the most simplistic of the three. This model allows the tenant to scale without pre-configured limits. It does also allow cloud consumers to scale without any contractual agreement on resources. Sophisticated capping mechanisms now allows

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Peer not authenticated error in vCloud Director

David Hill — Tue, 14 May 2013 12:32:52 +0000

Some of my colleagues and I have been presenting a vCloud training session today, and one of the students got the error “Peer not Authenticated” when deploying a vApp. To diagnose the problem, first we need to turn on debugging in vCloud Director. We do this by following the steps below: Select System Click the Administration Button Select General Enable the checkbox next to “Display Debug Information” Peer not Authenticated debug information Going back and looking at the error we see a lot more information. Now looking at this error you can see that it is an issue with SSL. This error can be resolved by disabling the checking of vCenter and vShield certificates. To do this follow the steps below: Select System Click the Administration Button Select General Scroll down until you see Certificates Remove the ticks from the checkboxes for “Verify vCenter and vSphere SSO certificates” and “Verify vShield Manager certficates” Click Apply Now if you retry the task everything will work as expected.

Using VMware Horizon Workspace to Enable SSO in vCloud Director 5.1

David Hill — Tue, 07 May 2013 20:58:01 +0000

I have just found this really cool whitepaper thats been released: Using VMware Horizon Workspace to Enable SSO in VMware vCloud Director 5.1. This is really useful if you are looking at an alternative method of authentication with vCloud Director 5.1 VMware Horizon Workspace can be used to enable single sign-on for VMware vCloud Director 5.1. This white paper provides information and procedures for configuring vCloud Director to allow for account federation from VMware Horizon Workspace. To read the white paper click here The full details of the white paper is available here at the Tech Resource Center on VMware.com

Tweetdeck kills Facebook integration

David Hill — Thu, 02 May 2013 17:52:51 +0000

Twitter have just announced that they will kill Facebook integration from Tweetdeck on May 7th. Quote from the Twitter/Tweetdeck site: To continue to offer a great product that addresses your unique needs, we’re going to focus our development efforts on our modern, web-based versions of TweetDeck. To that end, we are discontinuing support for our older apps: TweetDeck AIR, TweetDeck for Android and TweetDeck for iPhone. They will be removed from their respective app stores in early May and will stop functioning shortly thereafter. We’ll also discontinue support for our Facebook integration. This is a major shame, I have been using tweetdeck for a few years now, and slowly all the integration with social media has been eroded. While I appreciate that Tweetdeck is now a Twitter owned and produced app, it really did make life easy updating and monitoring Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIN. I hope they reconsider this, but I very much doubt it. Looks like there is a gap in the market place again for an app that can manage all people’s social media in one place… Any takers or suggestions? To read more on this follow this link https://blog.twitter.com/2013/update-tweetdeck

Cool VMware Education sites

David Hill — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 17:10:07 +0000

My manager Rupen Sheth found this cool VMware Education sites during some meetings with the VMware Education team. I thought it would be good to share the links. The first site, is an educational site that contains videos for a number of different VMware products. The URL for this site: http://vmwarelearning.com/ This site is really cool, and I personally like the videos based on vCloud Director. The second is more of a hierarchical path that you can follow. This allows you to decide which courses and achievements you need to take to become fully certified in your particular career path. There are three career paths to take, Architect, Developer and Administrator. You can then dig deeper by looking at the particular areas and tracks of interest, for example, Cloud or End User Computing. Its really cool, and also very useful. The URL for this site is http://www.vmwarelearningpaths.com/ I have personally found these sites really interesting and very helpful thats for sure. I would recommend you take a look at these.

VMworld 2013 – Public voting is open

David Hill — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 22:02:19 +0000

Its that time of year again, where the public vote is open for the VMworld 2013 sessions YOU want to see. You can start voting straight away by clicking here. I have listed the sessions that I have submitted below, and hope that you think they are suitable and worthy of your vote. Session ID: 4517 Title: Deploying a Private cloud with vCloud Automation Center and vSphere Abstract: In this session we will cover the requirements needed to deploy vCloud Automation Center with the end goal of enabling a vSphere environment to become a private cloud. Multiple real world scenarios will be demonstrated with recommendations on best practice and potential pitfalls. Presenters: David Hill and Raman Veeramraju Session ID: 4529 Title: Architecting a Software Defined Datacenter Abstract: This session will discuss the various design considerations when architecting a software defined datacenter. We will start with sizing and scaling and end with some operational guidance. Different examples will be used to show the impact design considerations can have on the availability of your services. We will cover how the different components of the vCloud suite integrate with real world examples. Presenters: David Hill and Chris Colotti Session ID: 4667 Title: Monitoring your

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DvFilter module is not up on the host

David Hill — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 16:45:57 +0000

Working at a customer site last week, we were looking at deploying vCloud Networking and Security App into the test environment. Sounds simple right? Well, when we went to install App, we had the error DvFilter module is not up on the host. As you can see by the screen shot below After a little bit of digging around, we discovered the following KB article. http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1028003 This issue can occur due to a previous incomplete installation or due to problems during uninstallation. To resolve this issue: Try the installation/uninstallation from the vShield plugin in vCenter Server. This provides detailed events when the installation fails. Verify if required modules are loaded in the ESX host before installing vShield App using one of these options Reading through the KB article, not all the commands are needed to resolve this issue. To resolve the issue quickly, SSH to your ESXi host (5.x or above) and run the command: #esxcfg-module –e /usr/lib/vmware/vmkmod/dvfilter Then SSH to the vCNS Manager and run these commands: enable config t no web-manager reboot You can then verify that the required components are installed on your ESXi host by running this command: esxcli software vib list | grep -i vshield Once

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How I see the future of Hybrid Cloud

David Hill — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 15:39:29 +0000

I have been thinking about writing this article on Hybrid Cloud for quite some time, but with everything going on at VMware, article writing time is becoming limited. Recently VMware announced the new Hybrid vCloud service and I wanted to take a look at the whole “Hybrid cloud model” and what I think (without my VMware hat on) it should actually be/do/mean. Lets start by looking at what the definition of Hybrid Cloud is. This article from searchcloudcomputing certainly sums up VMware’s and most peoples view. A hybrid cloud is a composition of at least one private cloud and at least one public cloud. A hybrid cloud is typically offered in one of two ways: a vendor has a private cloud and forms a partnership with a public cloud provider, or a public cloud provider forms a partnership with a vendor that provides private cloud platforms. My favourite way of describing Hybrid cloud is explained here In some situations, the customer may need both a local server running specific applications and a cloud service that hosts additional applications, files, or databases. In such a situation, the two are often configured for interoperability. Now this is all great, but to me its

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Looking for Cloud Credibility? New site by VMware

David Hill — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 23:15:47 +0000

VMware has launched a new site called Cloud Credibility. Its a kind of fun interactive online game where you can build up your #cloudcred. So what is CloudCred? According to the cloudcredibility.com site it is: If you know your stuff when it comes to the cloud, then you’ve got Cloud Cred. Cloud Cred is the hub for all things cloud related. The game is your gateway to building your cloud expertise, broadening your professional network and earning rewards and certifications based on your Cloud Cred score. Looks kinda fun and interesting, I have signed up and going to try to see what I can achieve. If nothing else, you can have the chance to win a trip for 2 to VMworld Barcelona. That in itself is surely worth signing up for. Im off to a good start, having completed two tasks, I now have a score of 502.