I have just realised that VMware Chargeback 2.0 has been released. A quick point to note is that vCenter Chargeback is now known as Chargeback Manager. From a vCloud perspective, this is what we have all been waiting for. Chargeback Manager 2.0 provides support for all the features in vCloud Director 1.5 and vSphere 5.0. To read the full release notes click here This is some of the important features I think will interest people: Charge thin and thick provisioned virtual machines differently Tier based Storage costing Complete support for vSphere 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5 Support for overage charging for org vDCs in the Allocation Pool model of vCloud Director Support for burstable billing or 95th percentile billing for the external network traffic in vCloud Director New cost models and billing policies for vCloud Director Complete support for vSphere 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5
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vCloud Ecosystem components explained
During VMworld Chris Colotti and I presented quite a few group discussions on VMware vCloud. During these discussions some people were amazed to find out how many components/products are involved in making up the vCloud environment. When planning on building a VMware vCloud, you are not just installing vCloud Director and pointing it to vSphere, you are designing/building a whole Ecosystem. The list below shows which components are used in building a full vCloud environment. They are listed in order of priority. vSphere ESXi vCenter vCloud Director vShield Manager vCenter Chargeback Vcenter Update Manager vCenter Orchestrator vCloud Service Manager vCloud Connector 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 […]
Cannot add groups to vCD after configuring LDAP
I discovered today building a new vCD 1.5 home lab, that once you configure the System LDAP, you dont have the option to add any LDAP groups. This confused me, it was possible to do this in 1.0.x. Why isn’t it available in 1.5? What I discovered is that the GUI is still configured for non LDAP authentication. Once you have configured LDAP and started the synchronization log out of the vCloud Director GUI and back in. You will then see that groups is listed under the administration tab. The GUI needs to update its configuration options. Simple solution, but still confusing until you realise.
How-To: Re-install VMware vCloud Director
A few of my colleagues have been working on this recently, and the process has been released on some of the communities forums. I thought I would share this process to help people re-build there dev environments and labs. This process documents how to wipe and re-install vCD, with the same version number. 1. Export vApp Templates and any other vApps that are required in the re-built environment from the existing environment. 2. Remove the VMware vCloud Director Configuration Components such as Virtual Datacenters, Organizations, vApps, VMs, Networks Pools and so on– manually. 3. Cleanup the External Networks. 4. Verify that all organization / vApp network portgroups are removed from the vSwitches/dvSwitches. You will still need the portgroups provisioned for the External Networks. 5. Cleanup all the Resource group datastores. 6. Unprepare the ESX/ESXi Hosts from the VMware vCloud Director web console. 7. Verify on the ESX/ESXi Hosts that the […]
VMware vCloud Director – Hidden Uber Admin
This feature was also in 1.0.x, but I discovered at VMworld that not everyone knew about the Uber Admin menu within vCloud Director. To open the Uber Admin menu, login to your vCD cell, Click About in the Support pane on the right, then hold CTRL + SHIFT and press U. This will open the Uber Admin menu as shown below. This allows you to set a few advanced options for display within vCloud Director.