Mike Laverick provides an overview of his home lab journey setting up vCloud Director. He describes transitioning from an earlier vSphere setup to using vCloud Director and virtual appliances. He discusses lessons learned around configuring compute, storage, and networking resources and ensuring IP ranges and VLANs are set up properly before using vCloud Director. He also outlines his future lab plans which include integrating a Juniper firewall and potentially upgrading servers.

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From Zero to Colo - vCloud Director in my lab
With Mike Laverick (VMware)
Blog: www.mikelaverick.com
Email: mike@mikelaverick.com
Twitter: @mike_laverick

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Before I begin
 Thank You VMUG Leaders!
 Competition Is Good…
 www.eucbook.com

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Agenda
 The Home Lab Backstory - Long, Long ago
in a galaxy called 2003….
 Former vSphere Setup
 CH-CH-CH Changes - vSphere5.1 Setup
 Compute
 Network
 Storage
 vCD Lesson Learned…
 My Lab To-Do List…

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What is vCloud Director?

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The Home Lab Backstory - Long,
Long ago in 2003…
 My first attempt with ESX 2.0/vCenter 1.0
 Location: Under my desk
 Girlfriend Impact: NIL

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The vCloud Suite: SDDC Era
 Virtual Appliances where possible/necessary
 vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA)
 Feature Parity with Windows version
 Switch allowed me to completely reconfigure resources around vCloud/SDDC
agenda
 Reduce “infrastructure VM” footprint
 Beware of plug-ins; Support for the web-client (e.g. NetApp VSC)
 vCloud Director Virtual Appliances (vCD-VA)
 Use built-in Oracle XE DB
 Dead easy to setup (No Packages, DB setup)
 Beware: No multi-cell, No migration
 Beware: Demo only; Labs; Training purposes…
 vShield Manager Virtual Appliance (Mandatory)
 vSphere Replication Appliance (VR)
 vSphere Data Protection Appliance (vDP)

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vSphere5/SRM5.0/View5.1 Era –
 SRM 5.0 Period (2011)
 Hello 2x Dell Equallogics
 Hello 1x NS-120 & 1x NS-20
 Hello 2x NetApp 2040s
 Hello massive colocation bill!!!
 VMware Employee Period (2012) >>>>>>>>>>>
 HomeLab & ProLab Merge
 Goodbye EMC
 Goodbye 2xPDU
 Hello 24U of extra racks space
 Hello to 14 AMPs extra power!
 Location: Quality Colocation
 Costs: £870 GBP, $1,300 USD
 Girlfriend Impact: Married 2013,4th May

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Virtual Silos
 The VMware Cluster as the New Silo?
 Discrete Blocks of:
 Compute
 Network
 Storage
 Q. Why do we like silos?
 Q. Why do we hate silos?

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Compute…

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Compute Continued…
 One Site; Two Clusters
 “Infrastructure” Resource Pool – No Management Cluster 
 GOAL: Maximize Resource; Setup Tiered Clusters
 Decisions:
 Different CPU types forced DRS separation
 Gold Cluster = HP DL 385s
 WHY? = More memory & FC connected to SAS storage
 Silver Cluster = Lenovo TS200
 WHY? = Less RAM, Only 1GP pipe to either SAS/SATA on NFS/iSCSI

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Storage…

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Storage Continued…
 Destroyed Datastores!
 Except
 Infrastructure datastore
 Templates
 Software (iso, templates, miscs)
 Originally a much more complicated layout – 7 Tiers!!!
 4 Tiers
 1. Platinum (NetApp, FC, SAS, SnapMirror – 5min RPO)
 2. Gold (Dell, iSCSI, SAS, Replication – 1hr RPO)
 3. Silver (NetApp, NFS, SATA, Datastore Cluster, 3x300 GB, Thinly Provisioned)
 4. Bronze (Dell, iSCSI, SATA, Thinly Provisioned)
 vSphere Replication for Replication from 3>4 or 4<3

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Storage Anxieties…
 Many Organizational Tenants sharing the SAME datastore
 What about Site Recovery Manager?
 What about performance – Capacity management isn’t the issue
 With Array-based Replication (ABR)
 One Failover to rule them all?
 No per-vApp Failover
 No per-Organization failover
 Solutions?
 Platinum/Gold datastores per-Organization 
 vSphere Replication 
 VMware vVols 

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Network…

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Network Continued…
 Goodbye Standard Switch
 Struggle to provide redundancy/separate with the “Combo
Approach”
 Many of the Adv features of vCD require Distributed vSwitch
 Classical Approach:
 Two DvSwitches
 One for internal vSphere Networking (vMotion, IP Storage, FT,
Management)
 One for Virtual DataCenter
 Backed by two VMNICs each…

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Network Anxieties…
 All my Provider vDCs share the SAME DvSwitch
 What about “Fat Finger Syndrome”?
 How realistic is that?
 Time to re-examine “Best Practices”
 Do best practices represents an ideal OR an ideal filtered
through the limitations of a technology
 Provider vDCs in vCD 1.x – One Cluster, No Tiering of Storage
 Provider vDCs in vCD 5.x – Many clusters, Tiering of Storage

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Lesson Learned
 When thinking about a Provider vDC
 All the resources matter
 Compute + Storage + Networking
 By far the easiest for me was compute
 But my “Gold” cluster has no FT Support 
 Prepare to make compromises/trade offs
 UNLESS all your hosts are the SAME
 VXLAN needs enabling on Distributed Switches via vSphere
Client
 Prior to creating a Provider vDC
 Watch out with VMs already on the cluster – vCD ESX Agent
 Running existing “infrastructure” VMs on a cluster
 Stops the install of the vCD Agent
 Has to be done on per-ESX host basis (easy)

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More Lessons Learned…
 Get your VLANs sorted BEFORE you use them in vCD…
 Beware of Orphaned VLAN references in the vCD Databases
 http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2003988

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Work out your IP before you start!
 “Wrong”
 192.168.3.x – “External Network”
 172.168.x.x – “Organization Network”
 10.x.x.x – “vApp Network”
 “Right”
 10.x.x.x– “External Network”
 172.168.x.x – “Organization Network”
 192.168.1.x – “vApp Network”
 Keep it simple – whole ranges dedicated

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IP Ranges can be tricky to change
 Even with vApps powered off – options unavailable
 Gateway Address
 Network Mask
 Resolution involves admin:
 Add new vApp Network
 Remap all VMs to new vApp Network
 Remove old vApp Network

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vApp Networks & Edge Gateway
 Every vApp Network you create:
 Creates a vCNS Edge Gateway
 Consumes resources
 Solution
 Create two vApps per Organization
 TypeA: One on the Organization Network
 TypeB: One on its own vApp Network
 Power off the Type B vApp to save resources
 Beware of static MAC/IP on Power Offs

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Establish a meaningful
naming convention…
 I KNOW EVERYONE SAYS THIS, BUT IN A HOME LAB
DON’T YOU CUT CORNERS SOMETIMES?
 <ORGNAME><NetworkType><Purposes>
 CORPHQ-OrgNetCorp-EdgeGateway
 CORPHQ-vAppNet-WebGateway
 Makes screengrabs, documentation & troubleshooting soooo
much easier…
 Register Edge Gateway devices in DNS…
 Helps with SysLog – watch out for stale DNS Records…

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OVFs – Portable?

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OVFs – Portable?

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Your Lab?
 Nested ESX
 http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/bestpractices
/nested
 vTARDIS? - http://vinf.net/2011/10/03/vtardis-5-at-a-vmug-near-
you/
 Workstation/Fusion – Out of the box nested ESX…
 AutoLab - http://www.labguides.com/autolab/
 Redundant Array of Inexpensive PCs (RAIPC)
 Community Hardware Page:
 http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/bestpractices
/crc

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vINCEPTION – Home Lab?

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vINCEPTION Levels
 vINCEPTION Level 0
 Physical ESX hosts, Virtual Everything Else (DC, vCenter, vCD)
 vINCEPTION Level 1
 vApp of vSphere running under Level 0
 Including vCD, vCNS Manager
 vINCEPTION Level 2
 vApps running under Level 1…

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vCloud vSphere vApp!

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Cloud Nesting

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Lab Future…
 The DONE List
 Make my External Juniper Firewall work with vShield
 Need new servers?
 Dell?

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Follow my journey journal…
 Text Blogpost
 Follow my journey!
 Search for “Mike Laverick – My vCloud Journey Journal”
 Subscribe iTunes:
 http://tinyurl.com/audiowag (Audio)
 http://tinyurl.com/videowag (Video)

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Questions (Welcomed) & (Attempts at) Answers
Blog: www.mikelaverick.com
Email: mike@mikelaverick.com
Twitter: @mike_laverick