Setting Up Infrastructure as a Service Environment.

[praveshupadhyay]

Hello,

We have enrolled for VSPP and are planning to start Infrastructure as a Service. For Setting up the Environment i have so far heard of vCloud Usage Meter is necessary.I do have vCenter Servers and Other Guest VM's. Please let us know what else is required for setting up a Infrastructure as a Service.

Awaiting your Kind Reponse.

Thanks a lot in Advance.

Regards

Pravesh Upadhyay

[mreferre]

I suggest you start here: http://www.vmware.com/cloud-computing/cloud-architecture/vcat-toolkit.html

Massimo.

[peterdabr]

Hi Pravesh,

The answer to your question is so broad that I don't think it can be effectively covered in a single post 🙂

The link to vCAT 2.0.1 provided by Massimo is your best bet as it contains information about architecture design for public/private/hybrid clouds and also provides examples.

The only  thing that I wanted to add (since you had mentioned it already) is with regards to Usage Meter. I'm under VSPP program and I had my fair share of problems with UM and I find the information that I'm about to present somewhat hard to find. So this is my short list of tips with regards to setting up UM:

-deploy UM on HA cluster

-configure email alerts for 'Success' and 'Failed' polling (at least during the first month) to make sure you're catching failures on time; you'll be getting emails every hour but at least you'll know when polling fails (Aggregator allows for up to 5% of failed polls which translates to around 35 failed polls for each billing month)

-add UM to monitoring (URL-based healthcheck + sending um.log via (customizable) syslog-ng to syslog server)

PD

[praveshupadhyay]

Thanks a lot Peter and Massimo, I would just like to know if i have a UM, wouldnt that be helpfull in starting my Infrastrucutre as a  Service, all alone.

Regards
Pravesh Upadhyay

[peterdabr]

The answer is no. UM is needed for polling vRAM usage and generating monthy usage reports that are then sent to the Aggreggator. You need to have UM connect to vCenter/vCD so those need to be up first. Generally speaking, you'll probably need UM as soon as the first VM is spun up.

PD

[mreferre]

PD is right.

UM is just the means by which we measure how many VMs you are running to charge you (since VSPP is a PAYG contract). UM has nothing to do with cloud/IaaS in the architectural sense.

UM allows you to get started in the sense you get the licensing / charging process aligned .... but how you build and consume the resources is another thing.

Massimo.