VBlock and vSphere5

[aiea96701]

I have just joined a company that is embarking on a purchase of VBlock.  They have vSphere 4.1 currently and will go to vSphere5 (presumably with Enterprise Plus licensing).   They have 85 servers and approximately 250 workstations.   They have 2 domains and my guess is that they would like to keep the delegation of authority separate as it is now.....

I've done some reading about vSphere5 with vDirector but I'm not comfortable enough yet to truly involve myself into the migration especially since they plan to encorporate VBlock.

They have 6 esx4i hosts with Standard licensing.   So, they have not used vCenter yet.   It will be a moderate change for them to setup their new infrastructure and allow it to become vCloud ready.

I'm fairly confident that I can setup the vSphere4.1 infrastructure (after they purchase vCenter) to provide the basic capability to migrate to vSphere5 and vCloud (as they want to setup private clouds).....but, my weakness is in knowing enough about VBlock.

Can anyone set me in a direction to get information about VBlock and how will it affect the overall administration of the vSphere infrastructure....ie. setting up hosts, vDataCenters, HA/DRS, Fault Tolerance.....anything different about it, at all?

[gary1012]

It's been a while since I've looked at Vblock so things may have changed. I'm thinking someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but here are my thoughts.

Many of the legacy tools such as UCS manager, EMC Unisphere, PowerPath VE, vCenter, etc. are still leveraged with the base vBlock in the AMP stack. Where it get's different is when you throw vCD and UIM into the mix. UIM-P will provision the hosts for you and track basic setup of the hypervisor versus what they call bare-metal unmanaged OSs or hypervisors. Not a lot of shizzle there but each new UIM version seems to provide more cloud aware features. The other tools will require some expertise in networking and storage. If you're not comfortable with the concepts of VLANs and for the 700 block; zoning and masking, then you'll need training there as well.

vCD on the other hand is a departure from your normal vSphere management practices on the resource side of the AMP stack. You must manage nearly all of the functions though vCD or you risk creating orphaned objects within vCD/vCenter. It is a best practice to manage all resource side functions through the vCD web interface and to use vCenter as a reference only tool. I would highly recommend taking the free vCD Fundamentals course as a primer and then highly encourage your management staff to procure the Deploy and Manage vCD course. You should look at the VCE Vblock Infrastructure Platform Guide and the vCD Architecture Toolkit as key reference materials as well.

[mcowger]

Your understanding of VBlock is still pretty much spot on

OP: Vblock wont change that much of your day interaction with vCenter, as things like UIM generally only impact physical provisioing operations.  vCloud Director, however, will change everything you know