Sunday, January 22, 2012 at 10:26 PM | Share Article VMware recently released the 5.0.1 version of PowerCLI with a new Powershell snap-in to tie into vCloud Director. They have included a video (below) to get you started on the cmdlets. Check out the video and then the full article after the jump.
Monday, December 12, 2011 at 12:34 PM | Share Article 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.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011 at 2:04 PM | Share Article By: Massimo Re Ferre', vCloud Architect
This topic is (rightly so) coming up a lot lately with the Service Providers (SPs) I am working with so I thought I'd share some high level ideas on how we are engineering those clouds. This short article is meant to share some guiding principles on how to engineer custom portals and backend integrations for SPs that are adopting vCloud Director. Please note that this is a very broad topic and if we were to get into all of the details and potential ramifications we would need a book and not a blog post to describe this.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 8:02 AM | Share Article This article provides common use cases for implementing vCloud Director 1.5 in conjunction with stretched cluster architectures and defines the supportability of these configurations.
Stretched clusters consist of two or more physical ESXi hosts deployed in separate sites that are less than 100 kilometers apart and are contained within a single vSphere cluster. VMware supports specific stretched cluster configurations for a vSphere environment. As vCloud Director leverages a vSphere environment to provide resources for a self-provisioning, multi-tenant cloud solution, it, in turn, supports the use of any supported vSphere configurations, including stretched clusters.
Saturday, November 19, 2011 at 10:45 PM | Share Article This VMware vCloud Director 1.5 Evaluation Guide is designed to provide a guided, hands-on evaluation of the most compelling and relevant features of vCloud Director. It walks users through a series of procedures, each building upon the previous. When completed, the evaluator will have a working configuration that illustrates the key concepts that should be understood before deploying a production private cloud solution with vCloud Director.
Because this guide is to be leveraged for evaluation purposes, it has been written to require the least amount of hardware resources possible. This enables users who do not have a dedicated test lab to still fully evaluate the capabilities and concepts of vCloud Director. This purpose-built evaluation environment should not be considered as a template for deploying a production environment.
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMW-vCloud-Director1_5-EvalGuide.pdf
