VCF on vCloud Director

This is however not a new topic and not the first time. Writing this for the people who have the vCloud Director based lab environments. I was talking to someone in my team on this and thought of doing this myself and share the experience through this blog. I will walk-through on how VCF can be deployed in the nested environment on a vAPP in the vCloud Director based environment.

Lets take a look at the diagram first and see what are we trying to do here,

 

As you can see above, we would have a vSphere environment with all components setup and on top of that there is a vCloud Director based infrastructure on which Users will create vAPPs consisting of VMs.

 

VCF 4.1 What's new?

 VCF 4.1 What's new?

Recently VMware released 4.1 VCF lets take a look what all new things were added (source: vmware.com)

The list is big and can be checked on the vmware VCF release notes site. I have just picked the ones I think are most commonly used and helpful in this release.

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Remote Clusters ROBO

VCF extends its capabilities to the ROBO and Edge sites with Remote Clusters. Now customers can enjoy the same consistent cloud operations in their core data center and edge/ ROBO sites.

ESXi Parallel Upgrade

Parallel upgrades reduce the overall time required to upgrade your environment. This enables the customer to update the ESXi software on multiple clusters in the management domain or a workload domain in parallel.

vRA Integration with Microsoft Azure

There are lot of articles and information already available around this topic. But I thought will do this myself in my way.

In this blog I will talk about deploy/manage Azure workload from vRealize automation Portal. This is not a very often seen used case in any organization but definitely something good to learn. I used MS Azure Public Cloud and vRA 7.3 for this blog. Similar thing can be achieved using Azure Stack as well, but I am yet to explore that option. vRA 7.2 is also fully supported for this.

VMware ESXi 6.0 Install (Interactive)

Prerequisites

• ESXi installer ISO must be in one of the following locations:

         On CD or DVD
         On a USB flash drive.
         You can also PXE boot the ESXi installer to launch an interactive installation or a scripted one.

• Verify that the server hardware clock is set to UTC. This setting is in the system BIOS.
• Verify that a keyboard and monitor are attached to the machine on which the ESXi software will be installed. Alternatively, use a remote management application.
• Consider disconnecting your network storage. This action decreases the time it takes the installer to search for available disk drives.

Note that when you disconnect network storage, any files on the disconnected disks are unavailable at installation.

• Do not disconnect a LUN that contains an existing ESX or ESXi installation.
• Gather the information required by the ESXi installation wizard
• Verify that ESXi Embedded is not present on the host machine. ESXi Installable and ESXi Embedded cannot exist on the same host.

vSphere 6.0 Upgrade - vCenter

vSphere 6.0 is now fully available and ready to be rolled. Here I would sit tight and wait for 6.1 to be out. As long as you want to deploy 6.0 in your Test and Dev environment it is fair enough. History shows that all 0 versions (3.0, 4.0, 5.0) were little bumpy and all 1's (4.1, 5.1) were most stable apart from 3.5. But this is my personal view. 

vSphere Client Integration Plug-In - Web Client

Sometimes it is difficult to download and install vSphere client integration plugin. Below is the location where it can be manually downloaded,

C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\vSphereWebClient\server\work\deployer\s\global\72\0\container-app-war-5.5.0.war\vmrc

vCenter down?

So whats the take when the vCenter goes down, I found a very interesting topic from the vSphere Design Book by Scott Lowe, so here is snippet below, what will work and what will not, when the vCenter is down,