So last week before PEX I had a chinwag with Mike Laverick. This was the first time I had done one of these, but found it thoroughly enjoyable. Mike had a few questions he wanted to ask me, but it wasn’t regimented, and found ourselves off tack quite a few times. Q1. What for you are the stand-out aspects of vCloud Director? Q2. Perhaps you can begin with a quick description of a Provider vDC…. Now Provider vDC can contain more than one HA/DRS cluster – what’s the logic behind where the VM gets placed? Q3. Do you think the changes behind the Provider vDC might ultimately lead to changes in design or best practises. For many a HA/DRS cluster represents a desecrate amount of compute/storage/networking – you could almost call it a virtual silo. Do you see that changing…? Q4. Can I ask what are you working on currently […]
Top Virtualization blog voting now open
Eric Siebert over at vsphere-land has opened the 2013 voting for the top virtualization blogs. I am hoping to make it into the top 50 this year. This is the first time my blog has been listed and included for the voting, so I am excited to see what people think of my blog and its content. The top 10 sites I voted for are: Duncan Epping Kendrick Coleman Chris Colotti Eric Sloof Cormac Hogan Rawlinson Rivera William Lam Alan Renouf Frank Denneman Rick Vanover Anyone looking to vote should follow Eric’s criteria when choosing there top 10. Longevity – Anyone can start a blog but it requires dedication, time & effort to keep it going. Some bloggers start a blog only to have it fall to the wayside several months later. Things always come up in life but the good bloggers keep going regardless of what is happening in their […]
Updated: Partner Exchange 2013 – Sessions I am presenting
UPDATE: My co presenter for my session on Tuesday 26th has been changed. I now have the great pleasure of presenting with Joe Sarabia. There are still a few places remaining, book your seat now. The PEX 2013 catalog has been live for a little while now, however I have just got confirmation of the sessions I am presenting: Session#: CI1113 – Architecting a Cloud Infrastructure Workshop Speakers: David Hill and Thomas Kraus Session Time: Tuesday 26th 13:00 – 16:00 Session Abstract: This session will discuss the various design considerations when architecting the foundation for every solid cloud environment, the vCloud suite. We will start with sizing and scaling and end with some operational guidance. Different examples will be used to show the impact design considerations can have on the availability of your services. This will be an interactive session where the attendees can provide input and feedback from there real […]
Cannot update the dynamic configuration policy error vCenter Appliance
Working in my lab today, I was having some issues with deploying virtual machines within vCloud Director. I remember a while ago that Chris Colotti had written an article about the importance of NTP with vCloud Director. I thought I had better syncronize the vCNSM (formally vShield Manager), vCenter Appliance, and vCloud Director. Setting NTP on a vCD cell and vCNS Manager is a very simple task, but how do you do it on the vCenter Appliance? There is no option through the configuration UI. A quick google showed me this page within the vSphere 5.1 documentation center. Procedure Log into the vCenter Server Appliance as root. From a command line, enter the following commands to configure and start an NTP client. yast2 ntp-client add server=your_chosen_time_server yast2 ntp-client enable Enter the following command to request immediate synchronization with the time server. sntp -P no -r your_chosen_time_server However following this guide, […]
Some vCloud Networking and Security Q&A’s
Q. When I configure vCNS Edge HA, what is the “Management IP” referring to? A. HA Management IP is the IP Address used for communication between the active and standby Edge. By default, the user does not need to worry about it (we call it zero-configuration), but the user has the option to explicitly specify it (and its interface). As you know, the IP Address is shared between the active and standby Edge, except this HA Management IP, which should be different. Q. If I enable HA, will it reboot the current Edge device during the installation of the new HA Edge device? A. No. When a user enables HA, vCNS Manager will deploy the secondary Edge device and republish the new configuration to both Edge devices. No reboot of the original Edge is required. In most cases, the original Edge device will be the initial active device, so there […]