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vCloud Automation Center – vCAC 6.0 Creating a Physical HP Blueprint

Physical blueprints are a bit different than Virtual Blueprints because you can’t give users the ability to define the exact makeup of the machine they want. They can’t decide they want to add additional storage to a physical machine like they can a virtual. They also can’t select which network they want the machine placed on (without customization) like a virtual machine.

What they can do however is tell you how many CPU’s and how much RAM they would like in the physical machine they are requesting. I know what do you mean they can tell me what they want? vCAC can’t magically add CPU’s or memory, but what it can do is look for a match, or the closest match to what they user needs. You have the ability to set a maximum and minimum number of CPU’s and amount of RAM a user can request from the blueprint. You can also determine how you want to allocate for each of them. You can have vCAC look for an exact match to the request, or look for an “At Least” match to find a server that meets the needs of the request.

* This tutorial is meant to show you the basics of creating a Physical HP server blueprint. I will be publishing a number of more complete physical provisioning tutorials and this article will be utilized as a reference.

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DailyHypervisor Forums are online.

We have just launched our DailyHypervisor Forum located at http://www.dailyhypervisor.com/forum. Stop by, contribute and be a part of our community. The DH Forum is intended to be for all things cloud. Currently we have forums created for vCAC, vCD, vCO, Cloud General, and Openstack. More forum categories will be coming based on demand. If you have a category you would like to see shoot us a note and let us know.

Our goal is to create a common place where anyone can come to learn, get help, share ideas, or just about anything that will help foster knowledge regarding cloud computing. Considering this very blog is the announcement of our forum you could image there isn’t a whole lot happening yet so what are you waiting for, be the first. Go ask a question, post an issue, share a thought and let’s get things rolling.

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vCloud Automation Center – vCAC 5.1 – Laying the foundation

Before we really start to dig into the fun stuff we need to dig a footing and lay a foundation to build on. In this article I’m going to create an “Enterprise Group“, a few “Machine Prefixes“, and create a “Provisioning Group“. For those not familiar with these let me explain:

Enterprise Groups

Enterprise Groups contain “Enterprise Administrators” and “Compute Resources”. When you create an “Enterprise Group” you will give it a name, assign those that will be the “Enterprise Administrators” and select the “Compute Resources” that they manage. The general concept of the “Enterprise Groups” is let’s say you have a group of administrators that is responsible for managing infrastructure in North America, but you also have a separate group of administrators that is responsible for managing infrastructure in Europe. You can create (2) “Enterprise Groups” one for NA and one for EMEA and in the groups you can map the appropriate administrators to the “Compute Resources” they manage. This allows you to separate access to the infrastructure to the appropriate admins.

Provisioning Groups

Provisioning groups contain your users of the infrastructure. These are the users that will make requests for servers or applications and consume resources that are provided by the ‘Enterprise Groups” Provisioning Groups have a few roles that make them up. The roles are:

  • Group Manager Role – The PGMs oversea the group, can access all the machines in the group, can publish blueprints to the groups, can work on behalf of the group users, approve requests made by their users and other groups based administration functions.
  • Support User Role- This role is intended for your help desk organization. The role allows the assigned user(s) to work on behalf of the groups users to aid in troubleshooting machine issues.
  • User Role – These are the consumers. The users are the consumers of the servers, applications, and resources in your environment. They can only gain access to what has been provided to the group(s) that they belong to.

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ESX vs ESXi which is better(Revisited vSphere 4.0)

Back in April I wrote a blog aimed and the differences between ESX and ESXi. The original post was written for ESX 3.5 and with the introduction of vSphere I think it’s about time i have revisited this topic and looked at the pros and cons of ESX4 and ESX4i. Now before we dig into the technical details there is one big thing you should all be aware of. The FAQ page published by VMware states “VMware ESXi is the recommended platform for both new and existing customers. Future hypervisor releases will solely be based on this architecture.”

For most that should be enough said. After reading that I would seriously start rolling out ESXi in a lab and start figuring out how I could maintain my needs without the service console most of us have become to know and love. I would also start brushing up on the RCLI as well as the PowerCLI if you are currently dependent on scripts that run in the service console. The good news is almost everything you do today in the service console can be achieved one way or another with ESXi as well. OK with that said lets talk about some of the other limitations.

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Citrix Xen Desktop (DDC) / Provisioning Server (PVS) & vSphere SDK

I’m sure many of you have run into an issue with setting up Citrix Xen Desktop (DDC). As i was setting up a new “Desktop Group” I ran into a problem when trying to configure the vCenter SDK address. The configuration wizard show you an example that looks say ‘For example, https://VirtualCetner.example.com/sdk” which is what you would expect to use and you would also expect it to work. Think again. When you try to setup your vCenter SDK address you will be presented with and error “The hosting infrastructure could not be reached at the specified address.” Citrix takes security serious so unless you plan on replacing the default SSL certificate on your vCenter server you will need to hack out a work around. Now I would agree that in production you should replace the default SSL but if your just trying to spin up a demo or test environment it can be a hassle.

So I searched the web over and over and found a number of threads with many of ways to resolve the issue only none of them seemed to work for me. However a combination of a number of things that I found did. So I’m here to save you the trouble of finding all of various pages with partial solutions. Below you will find exactly what you need to do to make this work.

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Parallels Workstation 4.0 Extreme

I have been a big fan of VMware products for a very long time, since the release of VMware Workstation 1.0 actually. I run VMware workstation on Windows, on Linux, and as of recently VMware Fusion on my MacBook. I was telling a friend of mine about how much I like my new MacBook as I have traditionally been a PC guy for many many moons and he asked if I was running “Parallels” on it. I had no idea what he was talking about as I had never pain much attention to parallels before. Well if you have never heard of them or ever seen their desktop virtualization products I highly recommend that you do.

Here is a link to their Workstation 4.0 Extreme demonstration. Just click the demos button and watch the video.   After watching this video I think I need to buy a few more monitors and some extra video cards because I have got to try this out.

Here is their list of features and I have to say it might just become my new favorite desktop hypervisor.

Run graphics-intensive workloads with optimal performance using dedicated system resources on a single workstation.

  • Parallels FastLane Architecture — Utilize a turbo-charged hypervisor engine to support the latest hardware virtualization technologies.
  • Direct I/O Access to Graphic & Network Cards — Take advantage of Intel VT-d technology on the Intel Xeon Processor 5500 series (Nehalem) and Tylesburg platform for full visualization and networking acceleration in a virtual environment. Supported hardware includes NVIDIA Quadro FX professional graphics card and gigabit networking cards.
  • Parallels Tools with support for selected NVIDIA Quadro Graphics Cards — Extensive Windows and Linux integration support for fully-optimized VMs, including native device driver support for NVIDIA Quadro graphic cards.
  • Adaptive Hypervisor — Load-balance CPU resources as you move between host and guest OS to optimize performance.
  • Support for up to 16-way SMP — Assign up to 16 virtual CPUs in a VM for truly high-end computing.
  • Large Memory Support — Assign up to 64GB of RAM in a VM.
  • Supported Primary OSs — Growing list of supported primary OSs include Windows XP SP2 64-bit, Windows Vista SP1 64-bit and RHEL 5.3 64-bit.
  • Supported Guest OSs — Growing list of supported guest OSs include Windows Vista SP1 64-bit, Windows XP SP2 64-bit, RHEL 4.7 and 5.3 64-bit and Fedora 10 64-bit.
  • Supports Virtual Disk sizes up to 2TB.
  • Up to 16 Virtual Network Adapters per VM.
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Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization

The Infrastructure Planning and Design team has released a new guide: Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization.

This guide outlines the critical infrastructure design elements that are crucial to a successful implementation of Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V). The reader is guided through the four-step process of designing components, layout, and connectivity in a logical, sequential order. Identification of the MED-V server instances required is presented in simple, easy-to-follow steps, helping the reader to deliver managed virtual machines to end users. Following the steps in this guide will result in a design that is sized, configured, and appropriately placed to deliver the stated business benefits, while also considering the performance, capacity, and fault tolerance of the system.

Download the guide by visiting http://www.microsoft.com/ipd and selecting “Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization” under the IPD One-click Downloads, listed on the bottom right of the page.

Infrastructure Planning and Design streamlines the planning process by:

  • Defining the technical decision flow through the planning process.
  • Listing the decisions to be made and the commonly available options and considerations.
  • Relating the decisions and options to the business in terms of cost, complexity, and other characteristics.