This weekend I figured I would give PHD Virtual's product called PHD Monitor version 10.1.3.1 a shot.

When I downloaded the trial, it's downloaded as a windows executable. I really wish it was a virtual appliance so I didn't have to have another 2008 R2 server in my environment to eventually patch. So I spun up a new 2008 R2 VM and figured I would give the installer a go without reading any documentation. The installation was very simple and straightforward. The installer includes a version of SQL Express 2005 as a database for the product. After the installation, the icon below is displayed on the desktop. I opened it up and began the configuration process.

This past week I spent a few days at the VCE Marlboro offices doing some lab validation. One of the topics that comes up on a regular basis is the integration of the Nexus 1000v in the Vblock Platform with the constraints of VMware's vCloud Director integration. VMware has released a patch known as vCloud Director 1.5.1 that doesn't allude to any new features of the 1000v product. My goal for the week was to see if VCD-NI and VLAN backed network pools could be automatically provisioned by vCloud Director.

The first test was to try and validate vCloud Director 1.5.1 with vShield Manager 5.0.1 and the current Vblock Certification Matrix 2.5.3 that uses Cisco Nexus 1000v 4.2(1)SV1(5.1), which is the supported version of Nexus 1000v that can do VXLAN among other things. The VCE 2.5.3 certification matrix also uses VMware vSphere Hypervisor ESXi 5.0 Builds 474610, 504890, 515841 and VMware vCenter Server 5.0 build 455964. The Certification Matrix is a very valuable piece to customers because it validates the software and firmware levels of all the components in a Vblock to guarantee integration and compatibility so the customer doesn't have to assume the risk of testing upgrades and releases, which can be a time consuming task for many environments.

Our test used ESXi build 515841 and vCenter 455964. These builds are normal vSphere 5.0 and NOT Update 1. After getting vCloud Director setup, we need to follow the directions lined out in Configuring Network Segmentation Manager. Of course, nothing is as spoon fed as I would like, so here is a step by step tutorial.

I check my website statistics to see why people visit my website. Often times, there is a google search for "how to install vCloud Director" and it points to my SQL installation. There isn't a good spoon feeding step-by-step guide so I figured it was about time. I'm all about some good help and I love detailed instructions. So I'm trying to build the complete guide.

This is going to be a semi-long post because the process of doing most of these tasks are pretty well documented, but not screen capped. I'm also giving credit to the authors of many of these steps because it's what I use personally to do installs. I am not going to cover design considerations or anything the pertains to the operations of vCloud Director.

I would suggest downloading this document now because it's key to have and know parts of this. VMware vCloud Installation and Configuration Guide 1.5

Step 1. (Optional) Create a vApp for your vCloud Director Management VMs. I say this is optional because some people would prefer not to worry about the resource being a factor. I like to put all my vCloud Management VMs in a vApp because I can then control the startup and shutdown policy to make sure everything is brought up in a consistent manner.

This was something i've been wanting to play around with for a while. vCloud Director has the ability to do some customizations so you can help brand your vCloud portal. After playing around with it for an hour, I was able to build myself a new color customized portal view. It's kind of cool and pretty simple. Here is a KB article called Customizing the vCloud Director User Interface Using CSS. From here, i downloaded the cloud-director-template.css and started changing around HEX color codes. It took a while to figure out what color code changed what because sometimes nothing at all would be changed. It's still pretty buggy, and doesn't really let you customize everything. I wanted to customize the arrows on the top left, as well as the blue highlighter when scrolling over the datagrids and the left menu, and some links, but I'm sure it will come in time.

I wanted to create a feel that is comparable to my website so it feels like there is some correlation. If you want my template, you can download it here or at the bottom of this page: kcdotcom.css

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22/02/12 12:38