Tag Archives | hybrid

VMware vCloud Air Microsoft Exchange

VMware vCloud Air Microsoft Exchange and SRM

Over the past few months I have been working on a number of scenarios for VMware vCloud Air and deploying Microsoft Exchange in a Hybrid Cloud design. I have written a couple of blog articles about the subject too. VMware vCloud Air Microsoft Exchange The first one was about how you would deploy Microsoft Exchange in a hybrid cloud and at a high level how you would do this. Read the article here. The second article, I wrote for VMware blogs, which discusses the business reasons behind why you would actually want too, and this article can be read here. At a high level these are: • Growth – Speed – Agility – Expansion – Fluidity • Leverage Existing Infrastructure – Backups – Archiving • Disaster Recovery – Build a highly resilient messaging solution • Operational efficiency – SLAs from cloud In the first article, I talk about why you […]

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host microsoft exchange cloud

Host Microsoft Exchange in a hybrid cloud

After a crazy few days at PEX, and lots of conversations with people, one of the questions that kept coming up was how can I design and host Microsoft Exchange Cloud in a hybrid cloud model. Great Question!! This is a great use case for the hybrid cloud.  One of the easiest answers is You could split up your exchange design however you see fit.  Client Access Servers could be hosted on vCHS providing the public facing part of Exchange, with the backend Mailbox servers on Premise perhaps, or split across multiple clouds for DR? Anyone who knows exchange, will be thinking now of all the different possibilities you could have. In my opinion Exchange is the best product to come from Microsoft.  They have advanced it tremendously with every release, and with Exchange 2013 you have all the built in Disaster Recovery and Disaster Avoidance features that really make […]

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vCloud Connector Firewall ports

vCloud Connector Firewall ports

I have been trying to export some VMs from my home lab to my public cloud provider, however when I tried to select a cloud I received the error that the vCloud Connector Node was not available.  After logging into the vCloud Connector server, I could see both nodes were down. I had enabled the firewall on both my public clouds yesterday, so I realised I had blocked the ports that the vCloud Connector Node uses to talk to the vCC server and other nodes. So I wondered which ports needed to be enabled. Reading through the vCloud Installation and Configuration guide for vCC 1.5.0 there is a great diagram on page 37 that explains the end to end data flow. As you can see by the diagram above the vCloud Connector Nodes talk on port 8443.  You need to open this port at both sides, your private cloud and your public […]

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vCloud Ecosystem components explained

vCloud Ecosystem components explained

During VMworld Chris Colotti and I presented quite a few group discussions on VMware vCloud.  During these discussions some people were amazed to find out how many components/products are involved in making up the vCloud environment.  When planning on building a VMware vCloud, you are not just installing vCloud Director and pointing it to vSphere, you are designing/building a whole Ecosystem. The list below shows which components are used in building a full vCloud environment.  They are listed in order of priority. vSphere ESXi vCenter vCloud Director vShield Manager vCenter Chargeback Vcenter Update Manager vCenter Orchestrator vCloud Service Manager vCloud Connector So why are these components important?  When designing a vCloud environment, you need to take into consideration the availability of certain components, like vCenter for example.  This is no longer a management tool that is used to manage your virtual infrastructure.  This is a critical component of your vCloud […]

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Cannot add groups to vCD after configuring LDAP

Cannot add groups to vCD after configuring LDAP

I discovered today building a new vCD 1.5 home lab, that once you configure the System LDAP, you dont have the option to add any LDAP groups. This confused me, it was possible to do this in 1.0.x. Why isn’t it available in 1.5? What I discovered is that the GUI is still configured for non LDAP authentication. Once you have configured LDAP and started the synchronization log out of the vCloud Director GUI and back in. You will then see that groups is listed under the administration tab. The GUI needs to update its configuration options. Simple solution, but still confusing until you realise.

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