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There has been a few questions about how to add multiple vCloud cells and I have also made a big mistake once by not following the correct installation procedure. This is a small subset of what is listed in the VMware vCloud Director Installation and Configuration guide on page 26. You can download a copy by clicking here Note: If you are adding a second cell to a mature vCD environment and have not configured a NFS transfer share then a few steps need to be taken before adding a second cell. Logon to the original vCD cell(s) Move any files in the original transfer data directory /opt/vmware/cloud-director/data/transfer to a temporary location Shutdown the original vCD cell(s) Logon to the second vCD cell Mount the share and add it to /etc/fstab Power on the original vCD cell Move the files copied previously back to the transfer data directory Note: Before […]

After reading a colleagues (Kamau Wanguhu) blog article on vCD Network Isolation today I found out about a tool included with the VMware vCloud Director agent installed on ESX/ESXi Hosts. This is a really easy way to look at configuration and statistics for vCD Network Isolation configured on that host. Kamau’s article tells us the following about the tool To get per host vCDNI statistics use: /opt/vmware/vslad/fence-util The utility can be used to display: Configured Networks and there MTU settings Acitve Ports and there port IDs Switch State including inside and outside MAC addresses Port Statistics on a port ID basis When running the command with no options, this provides the help for the utility: ~ # /opt/vmware/vslad/fence-util vsla-fence log at Thu Mar 24 09:09:54 2011 fence-util [options] command [arguments [arguments]] -h This help message. -v Turn on verbose mode -q Turn on quiet mode -r Reset statistics after executing […]

Seen a few emails flying around the other day about how to add a remote Syslog server to the vCD cell once it has been installed. This has caught out a few people in the past couple of months. Follow the documentation and edit the syslog section in /opt/vmware/cloud-director/etc/responses.properties then re-run the configuration. Add your Syslog server to the audit.syslog.host line in /opt/vmware/cloud-director/etc/global.properties Restart the vCD Cell [service vmware-vcd restart] This will then configure vCD for using a remote syslog server. Please note: This is only required if you have an already installed or pre-configured vCD cell.  For all fresh installations follow the guidelines in the installation guide.

An interesting topic came up the other day between some of us in the cloud team, regarding whether Ephemeral Ports should be continued to be used with vCD deployments. A colleague of mine Aidan Dalgleish (Senior Consultant, VMware TS Cloud Practice) kindly documented our discussions and wrote up the decisions.  He can be found on LinkedIn. Background The topic of Portgroup binding was discussed and Ephemeral binding was selected as the preferred option for vCD created Portgroups for some of the following reasons: *   Due to the dynamic nature of vCloud Director it is often difficult to define how many devices will be connected to a given Portgroup *   Easy to code as there is no requirement to monitor and dynamically adjust the number of ports configured on the Portgroup as with Static/Dynamic *   Very flexible due to their being no requirement to define a number of ports and hence […]