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Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Pet Clinic Application - vCloud PoC

I don’t know how much experience any of you have in delivering the Spring Source Pet Clinic application which can be used as a good sample application when delivering vCloud Director. Based on recent experience I thought I would share:

Pet Clinic Spring Source Sample Application – The Pet Clinic application is a simple two VM application running on CentOS, it consist of a one VM running Tomcat and IMDB and a second VM running Apache Web Server.

The application is deployed using OVF import into a vSphere infrastructure and has the default configuration:

VM Description:            Tomcat and IMDB Server                 Apache Server 
Hostname:                    pc-vm-0-0                                      pc-vm-1-0
IP Address:                   192.168.2.101                                 192.168.2.100
Root Password:             napa                                               napa

If you need to deploy the application and alter the IP Address as in my case to test the vSphere Infrastructure the following files need to be edited:

Tomcat & Apache Server
/etc/hosts                               (Alter the local host entry to match new IP Address)
/etc/sysconfig/network            (Alter the default gateway)
/etc/sysconfig/networking/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0     (Alter the servers IP Address)

Apache Server Only
/etc/httpd/conf.d/proxy.conf    (Alter the IP Address of the DB Server)                                       

Step 2 - Deploying the Pet Clinic application and proving the web service. If you know much about vCD then you will be aware that there are many ways to hook up network connectivity, on a recent engagement I devised the following scenario’s to demonstrate to my customer, the key element I was looking to show was the ability to deploy multiple copies of the Pet Clinic application with the default system configuration detailed in my earlier post.

Scenario One – Internal Organisation Network
Multiple Pet Clinic vApps with a vApp Network of 192.168.2.x, each vApp Network is connected to the Internal Organisation Network through a vShield Edge with only NAT enabled, this allocates an IP address from the Org Network to each VM within the vApp.

Windows management VM deployed directly on the Org Network, application proving is then done through vCD Remote Console onto this VM. A web connection is then made using a NATed IP to test the Pet Clinic application.

Scenario Two – External Organisation Network directly connected
Add a Windows VM into the Pet Clinic vApp and then deploy multiple Pet Clinic vApps with two vApp Networks. Network one using 192.168.2.x, and network two using 192.168.3.x. All three VMs are attached to the 192.168.2.0 network to allow the application to function as normal and the Windows VM has a second NIC set as the primary to the 192.168.3.x network.

The vApp is then connected to the External Organisation Network through a vShield Edge with NAT enabled on the 192.168.3.x network only. This provide the Windows VM with an IP address on the customers corporate LAN giving a direct RDP connection to the Windows VM in order to test and alter the application. The reason for creating the second vApp network was to limit the number of IPs needed when the vApp is powered as the customer could only provide 10 IPs.

Additional Management
I additionally deployed a second management VM directly on the External Organisation Network and allocated two network cards one connected to it and the second attached to the Internal Organisation Network, this provided the added benefit of a jump box to allow access to the vApps deployed within the Internal Organisation. From the jump box the NATed IP of the Pet Clinic application can be used to access the application.

As I said before there are plenty of choices when configuring vCD and the above is just what I’ve set up recently to demonstrating the capabilities.

Monday, December 12, 2011

vCloud Connector v1.5

In November 2011 VMware released the latest version of their free tool called vCloud Connector. The purpose of this application is to enable customers to migrate virtual machines between vSphere, Private vCloud and Public vCloud platforms. With the latest release there have been various enhancements which include:

- Direct connectivity to vcloud.vmware.com
- New architecture
With the release of v1.5 the vCloud Connector architecture has been re-designed. VMware has created three distinct components:
- vCloud Connector UI
The vCloud Connector UI is the user interface, this can be presented to the vSphere Client  or vcloud.vmware.com

- vCloud Connector Server
The vCloud Connection Server is a virtual appliance that is deployed to manage and coordinate tasks.

- vCloud Connector Node
The vCloud Connector Nodes are virtual appliances that handle the transfer of content from one cloud to another.






Sunday, December 11, 2011

Handy RedHat Commands

As I continue to help customers build out their private clouds using vCloud Director I'm finding that I'm personally needing to build up my Linux skills (I come from a Windows background like a lot of VMware users) so I've created this post to bring all this information into one spot. As I find additional useful commands I will update. Enjoy !!

Disable Firewall
By default the Firewall service within Red Hat is enabled, when setting up the vCloud Director cells this will stop you from being able to hit the url once installed. Use the following commands to check and configure the firewall:

Check the firewall status

# /etc/init.d/iptables status

Disable the firewall service

# /etc/init.d/iptables save
# /etc/init.d/iptables stop
# chkconfig iptables off

or

# service iptables save
# service iptables stop
# chkconfig iptables off



Viewing Logs using tail
When deploying the vCloud Director Cells, you will need to monitor the services starting in case any issues occur (DNS is always a good one). The Linux tail command is useful in this situation, by default TAIL will print the last 10 lines but with some additional values we can display more lines and follow the output as it changes. This can be acheived using the following commands: 

# tail –f -n 50 /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/logs/cell.log

Checking Version of Red Hat
If you want to double check the version of Red Hat you running then the following command can be issued: 

# tail /etc/redhat-release