So the other day, a bunch of us were asked the question: “A customer of ours has asked if the partial writes issue with linked clones that was found in View and fixed in 5.2 with SE sparse disks has also been fixed in vCloud Director Fast Provisioning with SE sparse disks” Cormac Hogan wrote a really great article on SE Sparse Disks, which can be read by clicking here. This is possibly the most exciting new storage feature in the vSphere 5.1 release. Space Efficient Sparse Virtual Disks (or SE Sparse Disks for short) were designed to alleviate two issues. Let’s describe these issues first of all. Problem Statement #1 – Let’s take a Guest OS running on a linked clone (View desktop if you will), and this Guest OS issues a 4KB write. vmfsSparse disk (which is the format used by traditional linked clones) has a block allocation […]
Tag Archives | vcloud director
vCloud Disaster Recovery White paper published
Alan Renouf and Aidan Dalgleish have written a white paper on how to automate the failover of your vCloud environment. This case study is a really interesting read, with some really cool concepts in it. Definite recommended reading for anyone looking to automate the disaster recovery of there vCloud infrastructure and provide business continuity. Click here to read the whitepaper VMware vCloud Director® enables enterprise organizations to build secure private clouds that dramatically increase datacenter efficiency and business agility. Coupled with VMware vSphere®, vCloud Director delivers cloud computing for existing datacenters by pooling vSphere virtual resources and delivering them to users as catalog-based services. It helps users build agile infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud environments that greatly accelerate the time to market for applications and the responsiveness of IT organizations. Resiliency is a key aspect of any infrastructure, it is even more important in IaaS solutions. This technical paper was developed to […]
vCloud vApp Design and Use Case – Part 3
This article is part 3 of my vCloud vApp design considerations and use cases definition. Click here to read Part 1 and Part 2 In this follow on article we will look at some more of the use cases for vApp’s and what type of vCloud Director networking they will use. Use Case 3 – vApp Network (Routed) You would typically use this configuration where there is a requirement for connectivity between multiple vApps but in addition a requirement to provide controlled segregation between them. In this example multiple vApps of the same configuration can be deployed without risk of conflict due to the firewall and NAT capability being introduced. vApps will have connectivity to an isolated Organization network for inter vApp connectivity, but there is no external connectivity available and all network traffic within the Organization is isolated at Layer 2. If you think of a training environment, where […]
vCloud vApp Design and Use Case – Part 2
This article is part 2 of my vCloud vApp design considerations and use cases definition. Part 1 can be read by clicking here. In this article we will look at the logical design of vApp use cases. I have spoke about these in the past in my vCloud Director Networking 101 post, but never really spoke about the specific use case. Use Case 1 – vApp Network Isolated This use case would primarily be used for development and test scenarios, where there is a requirement for vApps to be completely isolated. In this scenario multiple vApps of the same configuration can be deployed without risk of conflict, since there is no external connectivity available and all network traffic within the vApp is isolated at Layer 2. The characteristics of these vApps are: VMs are connected together on isolated vApp networks No connectivity between multiple vApps or to organization networks Same configuration can […]
vCloud vApp Design considerations – Part 1
This is carrying on from my session at PEX that I presented with Hugo Phan. A few people have asked if I could provide some information of vApp Use Cases, and what design considerations are involved in this. This is part 1 of a 4 part article. So lets start off with some logical considerations vApp Logical Design The list below shows some of the basic design considerations that you need to consider when putting together your vApp. Use the latest version of VMware Tools Select 1 vCPU as a default UNLESS specifically required Use VMXNET3 network adapters where applicable Secure Virtual Machines as you would standard VMs or physical Use standard Virtual Machine naming conventions Virtual Hardware version – CPU intensive workloads require HW version 9 One thing that people also need to bear in mind (and has been mentioned many times previously) is that a vCloud vApp is different […]