Vdirector and VM vapps

[ianweekes191]

hi, I am new to vdirector and we are trying to run the application as a test / staging env for out pd teams. but we are unsure of the best way to provision our Oracle VMs,

every time we create a new Vapp with an oracle vm and we change the name of the oracle server we are unable to login with the root admin password of the linux server. we are also unable to acess the oracle DB for some reason

My question is are able to script the changes of the oracle DB for the server name etc. if not what would be the best way to automate these changes.

I am guess there is either another app that allows people to do this or another.

any help would be great

[mcfadyenj]

I am currently about to do the same as you. My understanding of this is that you replicate your vApps and place a fence around each new vApp.

the fence will include a NAT router which provides an external ip address which is visible to your oracle clients. So the tnsnames.ora files should be pointed at your external address and your servers remain with the same name in each environment.

when you point your clients at the external address on the nat router it should route the calls to the real oracle server inside the fence.

on another note there is another tool for automation purposes which is free and included with vsphere called vmware orchestrator. I don't think you need it in this case but it is great for setting up the vApps in an automated fashion. I am currently building full automated vApps with vCO now just working on the same issue as you in vCD. I will keep you posted later today

[mcfadyenj · Accepted solution]

I thought I would update you on my progress. I gave up on the fenced networks as it didnt seem to work as I expected it would.

I did however find a nice solution to the issue you have.

I have a requirement for 3 vmware vlans so I will walk you through what I did.

I setup 3 dv portgroups on a dvs switch all backed against vmware vlans.

From there I setup 3 external networks in vcd

I setup 3 direct connected org networks to each of the vlans.

Then when building the vApps and adding each machine config you can add vapp networks with local address ranges.

After you have setup the vapp you can connect the vApp networks to the direct connected org networks. This in turn gives your machines an internal / external addressing scheme.

for my purposes I wanted a 1 to 1 ip matching scheme against the vmware vlan backed ip's (this is the important part for the oracle client)

so for each vm I had a scenario like so.

external ip  10.10.10.1 (vlan visible IP)

internal ip   192.168.10.1 (server vApp ip schema)

I like to keep the last 2 octects matching (i.e. 10.1)  so its easy to see how the nat mapping works.

After you have completed each machine vApp network config goto the networking page of the vApp. You can setup NAT / Firewall rules by selecting the vApp from the right hand pane on the left side of the pane and right clicking it.

This effectively means you can ping the 10.10.10.1 address from external to vcd and get a success. Therefore your oracle clients would have TNSNAMES entries of 10.10.10.1 which will resolve at the NAT router to the servers real IP of 192.168.10.1

I hope this helps. Feel free to hook me up with some points 🙂