Change from LabManager to vCloud Director

[Retcher]

Hey,

at the moment we are using the LabManager for our Learning Center, but the LabManager will not be refreshed anymore.

So I thought about migrating to vCloud Director.

Here a short overview about our environment at the moment:

ESXi Hosts:

2 Ariane 180 with 2 Intel Xeon E5520, 96GB RAM, 4 1GB NICs and 2 147GB Local Disks running ESXi 4.1 U2 Enterprise Plus

Storage:

1 NetApp FAS2040 with 3 DS14mk2 FC Shelves with 42 147GB 10k FC Disks

All Datastores are connected over NFS.

On these 2 Hosts are the servers for management (DC, VC, LabManager, Backup and other), and also all the labs. At the moment their is no central SQL Server, every system which needs a database have a SQL Server installed locally. But if we change to vCloud Director we will get an extra server just for SQL.

In LabManager we have for every lab user in the enviroment a workspace defined as well as for both of our 2 training rooms.

So I ask myself, if we change to vCloud Director will I create an organization vDC for each user, or just for each training room one.

Hopefully you can give me so tipps and tricks.

Kind regards

Retcher

[JayhawkEric]

If each user/room is going to use the Pay-As-You-Go Allocation Model and the same network I would put them all in the same Org VDC as you wouldn't gain anything other than seperate Resource Pools in vCenter.  If you want to make sure some users or training rooms get at least a specific amount of resources or you need to specify different networks for different users/rooms then you'll want to create different Org VDC's.

[Retcher]

At the moment all Labs are deployed in one Resource Pool. If it is possible I would like to do this in vCloud to, but both rooms need do use their own Labs an should not be able to see the Labs for the users in the other room.

So I've to create a Org VDC for each room correct?

[JayhawkEric]

The Org VDC is used for different Allocation Models.  If each user is assigned just the "vApp User" role they will only be able to see their vApps within vCD.  You have to have higher rights to see other vApps.  You will only want 1 Org VDC.

[Retcher]

Ok, thanks for the answers so far.

Would it be useful to you for the vCloud Director and the Network for the Management VMs different vSwitches (vDS for vCloud, vSS for Management)?

So that every Host has two NICs for the vDS, two NICs for the vSS and two other NICs for an other vSS for NFS and vMotion.

[JayhawkEric]

It all is a matter of personal preference and how much data you transfer. 

I have the same kind of of hardware as far as number of NIC's and I use iSCSI.  The only thing I would do different would be to put your VMotion on the same switch as your management but change your "Management Network" NIC Teaming settings to use one NIC as Active and the other as Standby.  Then set the VMotion VMKernel NIC Teaming settings to the opposite.  This way you'll have redundancy but not step on the other traffic. 

You can add a second VMotion with vC5 and set it to use the same NIC Teaming settings as the Management network if you want.  I do this as we create between 2700-3000 new vApps each month.  There's a fair amount of vMotions going on.

Also, I use the DVS for my infrastructure VM's as well but they are on a different cluster.  We have 11 hosts in our vCD environment and 10 more in other clusters.

Eric

[PEricksonSkytap]

Hi Retcher,

I'm curious, you mention that you are thinking about migrating to vCloud Director, so it sounds like it's not necessarily a given. What are the most important things you would be looking for in an alternative to VCD?

Pete

[Retcher]

Hey Pete,

I talked today to my teamleader and received some infos, which make it necessary to migrate to the vCloud Director.

Why I migrate to vCloud? The Learningcenter is in the responsibility of our team (VMware, NetApp, CommVault). So I will use the products provided by these vendors.

Tomorrow we will start making plans for the new environment. I will give you some infos as soon as possible.

Retcher