Online VMware Training

The virtual machines in a vApp can connect to vApp networks (isolated or routed) and organization vDC networks (direct or fenced). You can add networks of different types to a vApp to address multiple networking scenarios.Virtual machines in the vApp can connect to these networks. If you want to connect a virtual machine to a different network, you must first add it to the vApp.A vApp can include vApp networks and organization vDC networks. A vApp network can be isolated by selecting None in the Connection drop-down menu. An isolated vApp network is totally contained within the vApp. You can also route a vApp network to an organization vDC network to provide connectivity to virtual machines outside of the vApp. For routed vApp networks, you can configure network services, such as a firewall and static routing.You can connect a vApp directly to an organization vDC network. If you have multiple vApps that contain identical virtual machines connected to the same organization vDC network and you want to start the vApps at the same time, you can fence the vApp. This allows you to power on the virtual machines without conflict, by isolating their MAC and IP addresses.You can configure certain vApp networks to provide IP translation by adding a NAT mapping rule. When you create an IP translation rule for a network, vCloud Director adds a DNAT and SNAT rule to the vShield Edge associated with the network's port group. The DNAT rule translates an external IP address to an internal IP address for inbound traffic. The SNAT rule translates an internal IP address to an external IP address for outbound traffic. If the network is also using IP masquerade, the SNAT rule takes precedence.You can configure certain vApp networks to provide port forwarding by adding a NAT mapping rule. Port forwarding provides external access to services running on virtual machines on the vApp network. When you configure port forwarding, vCloud Director maps an external port to a service running on a port on a virtual machine for inbound traffic.

vCenter Operations Manager 5.6 is the latest release of VMware's integrated operations suite, converging performance, capacity, and configuration management. This new release introduces the following features and enhancements.This release introduces vCenter Operations Manager integration in the vSphere Web Client. Badges appear in the vSphere Web Client interface when you register an instance of VMware vCenter Operations Manager with a vCenter Server that you want to monitor. Your vCenter Operations Manager license determines which badges and widgets you can see in the vSphere Web Client.Note: vCenter Operations Manger supports integration in the VMware vSphere Client for vCenter Server 5.1.

When you perform certain virtual machine management operations, such as creating a virtual disk, cloning a virtual machine to a template, or migrating a virtual machine, you can specify a provisioning policy for the virtual disk file. NFS datastores with Hardware Acceleration and VMFS datastores support the following disk provisioning policies. Thick Provision Lazy ZeroedThick Provision Eager ZeroedThin ProvisionOn NFS datastores that do not support Hardware Acceleration, only thin format is available. You can use Storage vMotion to transform virtual disks from one format to another. Thick Provision Lazy Zeroed Creates a virtual disk in a default thick format. Space required for the virtual disk is allocated when the virtual disk is created. Data remaining on the physical device is not erased during creation, but is zeroed out on demand at a later time on first write from the virtual machine. Using the default flat virtual disk format does not zero out or eliminate the possibility of recovering deleted files or restoring old data that might be present on this allocated space. You cannot convert a flat disk to a thin disk. Thick Provision Eager Zeroed is type of thick virtual disk that supports clustering features such as Fault Tolerance. Space required for the virtual disk is allocated at creation time. In contrast to the flat format, the data remaining on the physical device is zeroed out when the virtual disk is created. It might take much longer to create disks in this format than to create other types of disks. You can use the Thin Provision format to save storage space. For the thin disk, you provision as much datastore space as the disk would require based on the value that you enter for the disk size. However, the thin disk starts small and at first, uses only as much datastore space as the disk needs for its initial operations. Note If a virtual disk supports clustering solutions such as Fault Tolerance, do not make the disk thin. If the thin disk needs more space later, it can grow to its maximum capacity and occupy the entire datastore space provisioned to it. Also, you can manually convert the thin disk into a thick disk.

You can configure vSphere HA to tolerate a specified number of host failures. With the Host Failures Cluster Tolerates admission control policy, vSphere HA ensures that a specified number of hosts can fail and sufficient resources remain in the cluster to fail over all the virtual machines from those hosts.The Advanced Runtime Info box might display a smaller number of available slots in the cluster than you expect. When you select the Host Failures Cluster Tolerates admission control policy, the Advanced Runtime Info link appears in the vSphere HA section of the cluster's Summary tab in the vSphere Client or as a box in the cluster's Monitor tab of the vSphere Web Client. This box displays information about the cluster, including the number of slots available to power on additional virtual machines in the cluster. This number might be smaller than expected under certain conditions. Cause Slot size is calculated using the largest reservations plus the memory overhead of any powered on virtual machines in the cluster. However, vSphere HA admission control considers only the resources on a host that are available for virtual machines. This amount is less than the total amount of physical resources on the host, because there is some overhead. Solution Reduce the virtual machine reservations if possible, use vSphere HA advanced options to reduce the slot size, or use a different admission control policy.

vCenter Operations Manager Foundation will give you insights and visibility into performance and health of your vSphere infrastructure and is now included free with VMware vSphere. VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite provides automated operations management using patented analytics and an integrated approach to performance, capacity and configuration management. vCenter Operations Management Suite enables IT organizations to get better visibility and actionable intelligence to proactively ensure service levels, optimum resource usage and configuration compliance in dynamic virtual and cloud environments. vCenter Operations Manager Foundation is the new, entry-level edition of the vCenter Operations Management Suite. It gains deep operational insights and visibility to improve the performance and health of your vSphere environment. vCenter Operations Manager Foundation is included with every vSphere edition free of charge.

Enhanced vMotion allows you to combine a vMotion and Storage vMotion into a single operation. Effectivly enabling a “shared nothing” vMotion. Use cases can be found in large datacenters and SMB markets; Cross host and datastore vMotion allows VM migration between clusters in a large datacenters, which may not have a common set of datastores between them.Cross host and datastore vMotion allows simpler setup and use of local disk, by removing the shared storage requirement, it lowers the barrier to entry for use of non-disruptive migrations and will be very useful for the SMB market.

In general, VMware recommends that the number of vCloud Director cell instances = n + 1, where n is the number of vCenter Server instances providing compute resources for cloud consumption. Based on the Service Definition, two vCloud Director cell instances should be sufficient and allow for upgradability (upgrading one vCloud Director cell, then the other) and high availability.It is important for vCloud Director to be able to spread and run services in case of hardware failures and load balance them on available cells as best as it can. This article describes how the Kemp Loadmaster is able to balance client connections to the vCloud Director portal and ensures a highly available multi cell deployment by monitoring services an response times.The Console Proxy and web portal are running on every cell and are stateless. All instances are capable of doing work so failure of any one component does not affect user requests as they are redirected by the load balancer. In a one-armed configuration, the Virtual Servers and the VDC cells are configured on the same subnet. The LoadMaster connects to the Layer 2 network through a single interface, eth0. This architecture covers load balancing of multiple vCloud Director sells within the same site. The Loadmaster service should be configured to check the health and response time of the individual vCloud Director cells. Since each cell responds via HTTPS, this can be configured quickly via the IP and API end point URL. Generally services are checked every few-30 seconds based on load. A good starting point is 5 seconds. Example GUI URL - https://my.cloud.com/cloud/

The cloud consumer resources are dedicated vCenter clusters that host cloud workloads. These resources are carved up by vCloud Director in the form of one or more provider virtual datacenters, which is a vCenter cluster, and one or more attached datastores. Networking for the resource group will encompass vSphere networks visible to the hosts in that cluster. Provider virtual datacenters are further carved up into organization virtual datacenters, which are backed by vCenter resource pools.If you disable Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS) on vCenter Clusters level you will lose all resource pools and you’re not able to deploy or power on vApps anymore. This video will show you such a situations, don’t try this at home.

In this video you will learn how a vCloud Director network is constructed. The PowerPoint presentation "vCloud networking explained in 1 slide and 52 animations" is created by fellow VCI over at Tuukka Korhonen (itvirtuoosit.fi).Port group backed network pools require preconfigured set of port groups either on a vNetwork distributed switch or on a standard vSwitch and port groups must be available on each ESX/ESXi host in the cluster. They need to be imported into vCloud Director when creating this network pool. This network pool is used in circumstances where vCenter cannot programmatically create port groups on the fly. Other scenarios when you want to use this network pool is when do not have vNetwork Distributed switches and want to use the Standard switch or when you want to use the Nexus 1000v switches. The port groups must be isolated at the layer 2 level from all other port groups. The port groups must be physically isolated or must be isolated using VLAN tags. Failure to properly isolate the port groups can cause a disruption on the network.Unlike other types of network pools, a network pool that is backed by port groups does not require a vNetwork distributed switch and this is the only type of network pool that works with Cisco Nexus 1000V virtual switches. A network pool is backed by vSphere network resources such as VLAN IDs, port groups, or cloud isolated networks. Network traffic on each network in a pool is isolated at layer 2 from all other networks. Each organization vDC in vCloud Director can have one network pool. Meaning each Organization vDC can only be assigned to only one network pool. Multiple organization vDCs can share the same network pool but make sure that networks in the pool are isolated. Only system administrators can create and manage network pools. vApp networks are used for connectivity of virtual machines within a vApp. A vApp can be connected to a vApp specific network or to an organization network. A vApp network isolates the virtual machines in that vApp from everything else; in that way, it is like an internal organization network, but is only used by that vApp. You can connect vApps to organization network to allow them to communicate with other vApps in that organization. When you connect a vApp to an organization network, determine whether you want a fence or direct connection. Fenced will allow you to have identical virtual machines to connect to organization networks without worrying about IP and MAC address conflicts. You can also have additional firewall rules added to protect virtual machines in the vApp. While direct connection will allow you to directly connect the vApp to the organization network.

A new feature in vCloud Director 1.5 is support for static routing. This provides the ability to route between network segments without the use of NAT and enables increased flexibility in implementing network connectivity within a vCloud environment. Though most networks will have a directly connected default gateway, it is possible for networks to have more than one router (such as multiple vShield Edge devices). Static routing provides a way to manually configure routing tables so that traffic can be forwarded to these remote networks while still using the default gateway for all remaining traffic. In vCloud Director, static routing can be configured at both the routed organization network level and vApp network level.For organization networks, routes can be defined within the organization network or to an external network.For vApp networks, the static routing configuration is simplified as routes are only applied on the external interface.To demonstrate the different options for static routing with vCloud Director, I've recorded a video which will show you how to add Static Routes Between vApp Networks Routed to Different Organization Networks. An organization administrator can add static routes between two vApp networks that are routed to different organization networks. Static routes allow traffic between the networks. You cannot add static routes between overlapping networks or fenced vApps. After you add a static route to an organization network, configure the network firewall rules to allow traffic on the static route. For vApps with static routes, select the Always use assigned IP addresses until this vApp or associated networks are deleted check box.Static routes only function when the vApps included in the routes are running. If you change the parent network of a vApp, delete a vApp, or delete a vApp network, and the vApp includes static routes, those routes cannot function and you must remove them manually.Prerequisites:vShield 5.0Two organization networks routed to the same external networkStatic routing is enabled on both organization networksA vApp network routed to each organization networkThe vApp networks are in vApps that were started at least once