VMware Introduces VMware vCloud Integration Manager

VMware vCloud Integration Manager software will allow service providers to quickly create and deploy cloud service offerings, operate at maximum efficiency and scale to meet customer demand in a reliable, repeatable and cost-effective manner. VMware vCloud Integration Manager will help service providers:

• Accelerate time to revenue: vCloud Integration Manager will be tightly integrated with VMware vCloud Director, VMware vSphere®, VMware vShield™ Edge and VMware vCenter™ Chargeback Manager to automate and accelerate the provisioning and delivery of infrastructure and associated services. vCloud Integration Manager will provide a REST-based API to integrate with a service provider’s back office systems (CRM, billing, etc.), and a Web-based administration portal.
• Simplify operations to increase efficiency and reduce costs:vCloud Integration Manager will include Web-based portals to streamline and automate service plan, customer lifecycle and reseller management. With the click of a button, service providers will be able to standardize product configuration and delivery, manage customer lifecycles from sign-up to decommission, and reduce the time and overhead involved in transacting with resellers.

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Additional Resources:

• Learn moreabout VMware vCloud Integration Manager
• Learn more about VMware private and public cloud computing services
• Learn moreabout the VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP)
• Read "vCloud Integration Manager and More Clouds in More Countries" blog post by VMware senior director of cloud services, Mathew Lodge
• Find, learn about and quickly test drive vCloud services at vcloud.vmware.com
• To learn how to offer a vCloud Powered service, click hereto join the VMware Service Provider Program

VMware vCloud Director 1.5 Performance & Best Practices

VMware vCloud Director 1.5 gives enterprise organizations the ability 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 virtual infrastructure resources and delivering them to users as catalog-based services. vCloud Director 1.5 helps you build agile infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud environments that greatly accelerate the time-to-market for applications and responsiveness of IT organizations. vCloud Director 1.5 adds the following new features specific to accelerating application delivery in the cloud:

 

• Fast Provisioning  
• vCloud Custom Guest Data
• Expanded vCloud API and SDK
• vCloud API Query Service
• vCloud Messages
• Cisco Nexus 1000v Integration
• vSphere 5.0 Support
• Microsoft SQL Server Support
• Globalization
• vShield Five Tuple Firewall Rules
• Static Routing
• IPSec Site-to-Site VPN

 This white paper addresses three areas regarding vCloud Director performance:

• vCloud Director sizing guidelines and software requirements
• Best practices in performance and tuning  
• Performance characterization for key vCloud Director operations

Dowload the whitepaper

Fast Provisioning in vCloud Director 1.5 Part 1

While checking out VMware's vCloud Blogs, I came across a great article that explains how Fast Provisioning works in vCloud Director 1.5.

Outside of a lab/test/dev environment I still don't see the value in linked clones for servers but it is a great technology if it is used in the right circumstances.

This is the first part of two posts that I plan to do on linked clones. A linked clone is a duplicate of a virtual machine that uses the same base disk as the original, with a chain of delta disks to track the differences between the original and the clone.

Linked clones have been in vSphere for some time now, but since they are not a feature that can be created, configured or deployed from the vSphere client or ESXi CLI, they do not get a great deal of exposure.

This first post is related to the new Fast Provisioning feature in vCloud Director 1.5. This new feature uses linked clones. In previous versions on vCloud Director, the adding of a vApp Template (containing 1 or more Virtual Machines) to a cloud was aclone operation. This was quite time consuming depending on the number of VMs in the vApp Template. It also consumed quite a bit of disk space. Fast provisioning saves time & space by using linked clones for virtual machine provisioning operations.

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Best Practices for Providers Offering vCloud Powered Services Part 4: Make Your Cloud Safe, Secure and Easy with VMware vShield Technologies

It’s no secret that security concerns are one of the biggest inhibitors to public cloud adoption – many customers fear moving their workloads to the public cloud, because they believe that the infrastructure they host themselves is safer and more secure than a public cloud. However, providers of vCloud Powered service offerings can attract more customers and customer workloads by demonstrating how VMware technologies can deliver higher levels of security, making their virtual datacenters safer and more secure, and often at a lower cost than hosting themselves. This is the 4th installment in our series on best practices for service providers with vCloud Powered offerings. 

To start at the beginning; Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

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Get Started with vCloud Connector 1.5 – Part 1

The following is an excellent article on the latest version of vCloud Connector from Chris Colotti's personal blog...

vCloud Connector 1.5 Architecture

First I think it is important to understand the new architecture of vCloud Connector 1.5 as it differs greatly from 1.0.  Many who have played with both will see the differences out of the gate, but I wanted to also tie this to how I deployed the various components for testing.  Refer to the figure below which was taken from the vCloud Connector user guide.

vCloud Connector Server – The server component is the control and management point for vCloud Connector.  You really only need one server as long as it can connect to the various nodes.  In my case the server was hosted in my lab, on the management cluster for vCloud Director.  I did not host it inside my vCloud as a vapp simply because I did not see the need to.  I decided to treat it like any other management server workload supporting the vCloud Eco-System

vCloud Connector Node – The “nodes” are the 1:1 connection points managed by the server.  The 1:1 aspect is that you actually need a node per cloud, Organization, or vSphere instance you want to move workloads between.  So in my case I needed two nodes on premise and two nodes hosted at Virtacore.  These remote nodes were of course hosted in the cloud.  I needed two of them because their public cloud is made up of two datacenters, each with their own vCloud installation and thus two different API’s.  The nodes are also where the various exports happen during the process of the move and where you may need to increase the disk sizes, or mount them to NFS if you can.  In my case I connected all the nodes to either the SYSTEM level or the top-level of vSphere for testing.  In a hosted public cloud, you could need more nodes depending on the number or organizations you have as well as the number of datacenters.

vCloud.VMware.com – This is the remote web portal you can use to manage your various vCloud Connector servers in a single pane of glass.  There is some requirements to get connected to this which we will talk about in a little bit.

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Update on Monday, December 12, 2011 at 12:51 PM by Cloud Canuck

Here is a link to Part 2