Archive | Cloud Computing

I have been building a VMware vCloud environment in my home lab over the past few days, and decided I would share my thoughts with regards to using Oracle Express Edition with vCD. Oracle Express Edition is based on Oracle 10G, but is restricted to one database instance. Anyone who has had previous experience installing and configuring Oracle 10g or 11g will know how much of a pain it can be, configuring to startup at boot time, creating a database instance, these are all tricky things if you have never carried out these tasks. Oracle XE however makes life very simple indeed. I decided to use the Windows version, and promptly downloaded the required version from here. Either the Linux or Windows version can be downloaded via this link. Once downloaded there is a self extracting installer, run this and complete the installation (pretty much next next finish). Once installed […]

Short answer = NO. Long answer = YES. I was working with a customer a couple of weeks ago and they asked the question, how do we configure the Anti-Affinity rules within VMware vCloud Director.  Another guy asked the question, why would you want to use these? Think of a use case where within a vApp you have two or three web servers (for resilience).  You would not want these to be on the same host, in-case of an outage.  Yes HA would restart the VMs on a different host, but of course there is an outage time for that.  This is where the anti-affinity rules have always been used within DRS to ensure the VMs are separated.  If you were not concerned about the outage, you would simply have one web server. So going back to the title can it be done?  Yes, but unfortunately not through the GUI […]

This is part 2 of the Q&A article published last week.  If anyone has any more questions regarding VMware vCloud Director please post a comment and I will try to answer your questions as soon as possible. vCloud Director Network Isolation (vCD-NI) Q. What limits exist when creating a vCD-NI-backed network pool? A. You are limited to the maximum number of ephemeral portgroups you can have per vCenter Server, which is 1016. (This is the same as a VLAN-backed network pool. Q. How does vCD-NI scale past the 802.1q limit of 4096? A. The 802.1q protocol (in standard implementations) tops out at 4096 VLANs. The use of vCD-NI requires at most one VLAN per network pool for the transport network. Q. Is vCD-NI provided as part of vShield Edge? A. No, it is built into the VMkernel. This is why the product supports a minimum of vSphere 4.0 U2 or […]

Duncan Epping at Yellow-Bricks wrote a excellent article on how to unload the vCD Agent using the command line.  I thought I would write one on how to do this through the VMware vCloud Director UI.  The benefits of carrying out this task through the UI allows the administrator to avoid breaching corporate security polices by enabling SSH, or having to log-in directly to the server console. 1) Login to VMware vCloud Director 2) Click Manage & Monitor 3) Expand vSphere Resources 4) Select Hosts 5) Right Click the host you want to uninstall the agent on 6) Select Disable Host – Once completed there will be a red circle with a X displaying under Enabled to denote that the host is disabled. 7) Select Redploy all VMs (This will move all your VM’s off this host and enable Maintenance Mode) 8 ) Select Unprepare Host 9) Once the host […]