VCPP Archives - Page 2 of 12

What’s New with VMware vCloud Director 10.0? (1/2)

With much excitement, VMware is announcing vCloud Director (vCD) 10.0 during VMworld US. This continues to provide significant value to our VMware Cloud Providers and tenants that consume vCD for services.

vCD 10.0 continues to demonstrate and focus on the following objectives:

A Service Delivery Platform – rapidly deploy and integrate services into a multi-tenant, scalable platform with ecosystem partnership.
Multi-Workload and Extensible Capabilities – it’s not about traditional VM’s anymore. Distinct additions like native PKS integration or next-generation virtual network services are integrated out of the box.
Intuitive User Experience – while technology can be difficult sometimes, vCD orchestrates and automates many of the backend infrastructure tasks to get services operationalized. With the new H5 interface, this is very evident.

I’m going to summarize a few items that are pertinent to this release. However, this is not this is a comprehensive list by any means. The goal of this post is to provide an overview of why each of these additions/updates matter to our service providers and consumers.

Disclaimer: while vCD 10.0 is announced as of today, features might change based on the general availability (GA) date. I’ve been working with a release candidate build for my review. Therefore, this is subject to change.

HTML5 User Interface Transition
NSX-T Support
Central Point of Management Additions

In Part 2, I will cover:

vCD Appliance Updates and Migration Path
Placement and Sizing Policies
Backup Ecosystem Certification
Miscellaneous

Hang tight, there’s a lot of information here.

VMworld 2019 – Checklist for VMware Cloud Providers

As we are approaching VMworld 2019 in San Francisco, I wanted to spend some time on what sessions and labs to review when attending VMworld.

The VMware Cloud Provider Program continues to grow exponentially and this year we have over 30 VMworld sessions that are focused on our VMware Cloud Providers. This is extremely exciting as we continue to see more of an emphasis on our great service providers and ensuring all VMware customers are aware of these strategic partnerships.

With that said, I’d like to highlight a few sessions that I believe will be important to watch live or catch the recording at a later time.

First off, our VCPP VMworld catalog is located here: https://my.vmworld.com/widget/vmware/vmworld19us/us19catalog?search.products=15615668180870019stm

Setting up Edge Clusters in VMware vCloud Director 9.7

Currently, I am working on some overall design content for Edge Clusters inside of VMware vCloud Director 9.7. However, I wanted to share a post on providing a step by step guide on establishing an Edge Cluster inside of vCD. I will much more to share on our corporate blog shortly, but this should start some thoughtful discussions.

Quick Intro to Edge Clusters

So what’s the deal with Edge Clusters? Edge Clusters now allow a provider to discrete control of tenant Edge placement. Previously, this was rather limited and only controlled at the Provider Virtual Data Center (pVDC) layer. With Edge Clusters, we now can establish this on a per-oVDC basis. In essence, the three main value points of Edge Clusters:

Consumption of dedicated Edge Clusters for North/South traffic – optimized traffic flow while minimizing the span of Layer 2 broadcast traffic.
Provide a higher level of availability to Edge nodes that can distinctly fail between two clusters.
Ability to balance organization Edge services between multiple Edge Clusters – I do not have to use the “same” Primary and Secondary Edge Cluster for every org VDC. This can be configured on a per orgVDC basis.

Below is a overall high level design of Edge Clusters from a physical and logical layer –

Removing VMware vCloud Availability 3.0 Plugin from vCenter

Recently, I had this come up where I had to remove the vCloud Availability 3.0 (vCAv) plugin from my lab vCenter. Today, there is not a way to do this through the vCAv on-premises appliance UI – it must be done directly on the vCenter. Therefore, after speaking with a colleague (Bill Leck), I received the steps on removing it from the vCenter instance.

The following steps will work with vSphere 6.5x and 6.7U1. With 6.7U2, you can skip step 2 – thanks Vladimir Velikov.

Here are the high-level steps:

SSH to the vCenter
Remove packages
Remove endpoints from the lookup service
Restart vCenter UI services

This is a very easy and straight forward process. I’ve documented the step by step directions below.