
PowerCLI for vCloud Director – Have your say !
PowerCLI for vCloud Director–Have your say ! VMware have recently announced a survey on the PowerCLI site, this has been setup to poll people for what they think would be the best way to introduce cmdlets for vCloud Director, personally I think it’s a great move and proves that VMware really does listen to their customers opinions. Their questions not only ask how you would like the vCloud cmdlets distributed but also if you would prefer common objects like VMs and Users to be new cmdlets based towards vCloud director or to add these as additional parameters to the existing cmdlets. Personally when answering these questions I have to remind myself of a few things and ask myself a few questions: vCloud Org users or tenants are going to be interested in different things than a vSphere admin, for example, does a tenant care about the details of the datastore […]
Restart all services on ESXi through SSH
I had an issue on one of my ESXi hosts in my home lab this morning, where it seemed the host had become completely un-responsive. SSH was still working, so I restarted all the services on that host using the command listed below. This works on ESXi 4 and 5, but I don’t know if it is a supported method. Note: This command stops all services on the host and restarts them. There is no guarantee this will not affect VMs running on that host. ./sbin/services.sh restart You will then see the following output as all the services stop and restart Running vmware-fdm stop Stopping vmware-fdm:success Running vslad stop Stopping vslad… Success. Running svm-autostart stop Running sfcbd-watchdog stop Running usbarbitrator stop watchdog-usbarbitrator: Terminating watchdog with PID 5625 usbarbitrator stopped. Running vmware-vpxa stop Stopping vmware-vpxa:success Running wsman stop Stopping openwsmand Running slpd stop Stopping slpd Running vprobed stop watchdog-vprobed: Terminating watchdog […]
VMware vCloud KB articles released this week
Thought I would share the links to some important KB articles that have been released this week. Hope they help. Special thanks to Michael Haines for sending this to me. Enabling centralized logging of vCloud Director cell logs (2004519) Date Published: 11/14/2011 http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2004519

vCloud Ecosystem components explained – Part 2
Recently I wrote an article about the overall “vCloud EcoSystem”, and what components were required to build out a full Cloud environment. The article briefly touches on the availability of some of these components. A quick extract is shown below: 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 environment passing through all the operational commands a consumer initiates using vCloud Director. How do you protect vCenter? There are 6 databases in a vCloud Ecosystem. How do you protect all the databases? Every component shown above with the exception of ESXi and vCloud Connector have a database that have relationships with each other. If you loose a vCenter database and […]