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

Doing it all(most) without a Distributed Switch


So you want vCloud, but you don't have a Distributed Switch; here is how you can enjoy vCloud using vSwitches.

Getting ready

Surprisingly, you don't need much, just a lot of port groups. Make sure that these port groups are created exactly the same on all ESXi hosts (case sensitive).

How to do it...

We discuss the changes required for each of the different networks:

  • External Networks: Instead of using Distributed Switches, we will use normal vSwitches with port groups. No big drawbacks here.

  • Network Pools: The only Network Pool type you can use is the port group-backed one. This also means that you will need to have one port group per isolated network. The drawback is that you can also only assign one Network Pool to each OvDC, making it a one-to-one relationship between the port group, OvDC, and isolated network.

How it works...

Using vSwitches instead of Distributed Switches with vCloud Director is a possibility, but normally this method is only used when VMware Enterprise Plus Licensing is not available. However, with the introduction of vCloud Suite (which comes with vSphere Enterprise Plus), it is not really needed anymore. Still, in some cases this might provide a solution.