Book Image

VMware vCloud Director Cookbook

By : Daniel Langenhan
Book Image

VMware vCloud Director Cookbook

By: Daniel Langenhan

Overview of this book

VMware vCloud Director is an enterprise software solution that enables the building of secure, private clouds by pooling together infrastructure resources into virtual data centers. The tool enables self-service via a web interface to reduce the management overhead and offers amazing possibilities for production and development environments. Thus, the tool will ensure efficient management of resources with data center efficiency and business agility. "VMWare VCloud Director Cookbook" will cover a lot of ground, ranging from easy to complex recipes. It will not only dive into networks, data-stores, and vApps, but also cover vCloud design improvements, troubleshooting, and the vCloud API. "VMWare VCloud Director Cookbook" is split into different sections, each of which deals with a special topic in vCloud - from networks, to vApps, to storage and design. This book contains over 80 recipes with the difficulty levels ranging from simple to very advanced. You will learn how to automate vCloud easily and quickly with the API, and also learn how to isolate a vApp and still fully access it without risking the network. Design considerations that need to be addressed while deploying the vCloud and more will also be looked into. "VMWare VCloud Director Cookbook" will make your life as an admin a lot easier by providing you with some good recipes that have been proven to work in small to large enterprises.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
VMware vCloud Director Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Appendix
Index

Using metadata to improve provisioning


In this recipe, we use metadata to improve general provisioning of VMs and vApps.

Getting ready

We need a VM and a vApp and some space to deploy and clone them. For a full test, have two user logins handy.

How to do it...

We will now create metadata and then use it.

Creating metadata

Perform the following steps to create metadata:

  1. Log in to your organization.

  2. Create a new vApp or use an existing vApp.

  3. Right-click on the vApp and select Properties.

  4. Click on Metadata.

  5. Enter the metadata in the fields as shown in the following screenshot:

  6. Click on OK.

  7. Create a template from the vApp.

Using metadata

Perform the following steps to use metadata:

  1. Log in with a different user.

  2. Deploy the template.

  3. Right-click on the vApp and select Properties.

  4. Click on Metadata.

  5. You can now see all the data you entered.

How it works...

Metadata is not only restricted to vApps and VMs but also to most other vCloud objects. Metadata comes in handy to keep things such as version numbers, ownership...