Tom Stephens Senior Technical Marketing Architect @vCloud_Storm I’m sure many of you have heard about the vCloud Director Appliance by now. It’s one of the fastest ways you can get vCloud Director up and running to evaluate it in your environment. The key here is that it is only supported for evaluation environments. As a result, certain design decisions were made with this in mind. For example, even though it is based on CentOS, only packages that were critical to its use are included. This helps to keep the size of the vCloud Director Appliance down, making it quicker to... Continue reading

Tom Stephens Senior Technical Marketing Architect @vCloud_Storm Today VMware released vCloud Director 1.5.1. The good news is that this minor release includes several bug fixes and new features such as: Support for new platforms including vCenter Server 5.0 Update 1, ESXi 5.0 Update 1, vShield 5.0.1, and RHEL 5u7 (64 bit) when used to host a vCD cell. A higher level of encryption is now available for use when configuring a site-to-site VPN tunnel. You can now select AES-256 as the encryption protocol. Firewall rules are now easier to configure. You can now enter CIDR blocks and IP ranges for... Continue reading

Tom Stephens Senior Technical Marketing Architect @vCloud_Storm Last week I had the pleasure to be in the company of Steve Hester. Steve is an architect who works for Canadian Pacific. Besides being an overall great guy, Steve is responsible for some vCloud Director environments that are used to provide on-demand services for developers. While we were chatting, Steve made a comment how he wished he had a simple way to get reports on his vCloud Director environment. Nothing horribly fancy or anything that required any additional overhead that he would have to manage… He just wanted something quick and easy... Continue reading

Tom Stephens Senior Technical Marketing Architect @vCloud_Storm Last week I spent some time at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco. It was a great event, though very different from DEFCON. To me, the best part of the event was having the ability to talk to customers. As to be expected, our conversations centered on security. One request that I heard a couple of times was for a diagram of the network ports used by vCloud Director. Luckily, VMware just released an updated version of this! You can find the updated diagram of the network ports used by vCloud Director... Continue reading

by Tom Stephens, Senior Technical Marketing Architect, VMware (Twitter: @vCloud_Storm) If you have tried to integrate a VMware vCenter Chargeback Manager installation with the vCloud Director Appliance you likely ran into some issues. The main reason for this was the configuration of the Oracle XE embedded database that is bundled with the vCloud Director Appliance. If you find yourself in a position where you want to evaluate VMware Chargeback with the vCloud Director Appliance, I’d suggest you go read this KB article. This article shows you how to make the required changes to the listener.ora file for the embedded database... Continue reading

by Tom Stephens, Senior Technical Marketing Architect, VMware (Twitter: @vCloud_Storm) Today, VMware announced the release of the vCloud Client for iPad app. Designed for the consumer of a vCloud Director environment, this app provides the ability to manage your cloud with your fingertips. Some key features of the app include: - The ability to create new vApps - Through the use of a third party app, you can access the VMs within your vApp via RDP, VNC, or SSH. Note: The supported 3rd party apps are: For SSH: iSSH Remoter For RDP: Jump Desktop Remoter For VNC: Mocha VNC Screens... Continue reading

by Tom Stephens, Senior Technical Marketing Architect, VMware It’s amazing how quickly the resources in your IaaS implementation will get consumed. Leveraging the vCloud Director catalog and vApp template features, users don’t have to deal with the tedious activities associated with standing up new environments. This ease of use facilitates the consumption of resources. As a result, it’s important for administrators of the cloud to monitor the amount of resources remaining in their environment. One method to do this is by using vCenter Operations Enterprise with an adapter for vCloud Director. vCenter Operations supports the use of many adapters to... Continue reading

by Tom Stephens, Senior Technical Marketing Architect, VMware Evaluating software to make sure that it is fit for purpose in your environment can be a time consuming task. One has to acquire the hardware, get the software, and configure the environment. Only then can they get to the business of performing the evaluation. Of course, virtualization helps here. Just a quick look at the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace and you’ll see hundreds of pre-packaged solutions ready for you to download and play with. Of course, VMware provides virtual appliances of its software as well. By going to VMware.com, you can... Continue reading

by Tom Stephens, Senior Technical Marketing Architect, VMware I recently saw a question asking if vCloud Director was supported with vCenter Foundation. This version is intended for use in small environments, and is limited to being able to manage three vSphere hosts. It’s a good question, as I’m sure there’s a group of people out there who would like to take advantage of building a self-provisioning cloud environment with a small number of hosts. Additionally, finding the right information can be challenging at times, especially if you’re new to using vCloud Director. First, let’s talk about how one can go... Continue reading

by Tom Stephens, Senior Technical Marketing Architect, VMware Recently, the question came up if VMware was planning to develop a certification around vCloud Director. Yes, we are indeed! As there is still a fair amount of work being done on this front, it would be a bit pre-mature to go into details now. For those of you who are attending VMware Partner Exchange (PEX) 2012 on February 13th -16th in Las Vegas, you will be among the first to get more details on this exciting development. If you want to start studying now, I’d suggest you brush up on the... Continue reading