VCE, along with Cisco, EMC, and VMware, are doing a 13 City US tour they are calling next generation data center.

I will actually be participating in the Cincinnati, OH and Nashville, TN sessions and perhaps one or two more surprise appearances. These sessions will kick off with a very brief high level overview and be followed by a round table or panel discussion. You will get to hear where VCE was, where we are today, and what's being planned for 2012, 2013 and beyond. This is a great way for you to not be bored by powerpoint and actually get to ask any question that has been on your mind. At the end of the session, you will hopefully get a better understanding of the impact of converged infrastructure and how your organization may need to change its current IT procurement process.

The list of cities is below and you can register here at http://www.nextgenerationdatacenter.com/ . I hope to see you there.

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

I was with a customer the other day and and they asked me to go more in-depth with lease times. To be honest, my initial thought process was incorrect and I want to dive a bit more in-depth on some configurations. This will hopefully make you understand how lease times work with vCloud Director.

As a cloud admin, it's always a recommended practice to create an organization that aligns with something for your internal IT/Administrators. Having an internal org is necessary because you only want a select few organizations actually creating public catalogs for consumption across the vCloud. For instance, in my very own vCloud instance, I created an organization called KendrickColeman that gives me the ability to publish public catalogs. You wouldn't want tenants of the vCloud publishing vApps to other tenants.

When a customer is deploying a Vblock Infrastructure Platform with VMware View or VMware vCloud Director, there is a consistent message that always arises, where do they run the virtual management infrastructure stack? View and vCloud come up on a regular basis, but this article focuses on any application that utilizes the Vblock as resources for a particular stack of virtual machines that comprise a Virtual Management Infrastructure Stack. This article is heavy on VMware design and I will be discussing what options are available to you to run a Virtual Management Infrastructure Stack and will make you think about your overall comfort with a solution.

To set the scene, take a look at these diagrams. I have created both a View and vCloud diagram that depict what we are trying to accomplish. In every management stack, there are a multitude of different VMs that make an application function.

In a VMware vCloud Director environment for Vblock, you will usually have these VMs (not all are required):

• 1 vCenter Server for Management Components
• 1 vCenter Server for vCloud Resources (optional but best practice)
• 2 Database Servers SQL/Oracle (1 required, 2 optional)
• 1 vShield Manager VM (can run in Fault Tolerant mode)
• 2-X vCloud Director Nodes. The amount of nodes depends on size of vCloud environment and level of redundancy
• 2-X Virtual Supervisor Modules for Nexus 1000v. The amount of VSMs depends on vCloud Size
• 1 VMware vCenter Chargeback Server
• 1 vCenter Orchestrator Server
• 1 RabbitMQ Server
• 1 Load Balancer
• and more…