Looking for Cloud Credibility? New site by VMware
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.
vCloud Director and SE Sparse Disks
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 […]
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 […]