duplicate hostnames in vCloud

[sbrad001]

I have a multi tenant private cloud environment... and I am concerned about how to handle duplicate hostnames with different IP addresses and DNS registration.  I don't see a way to force hostnames to be a certain format.

Anyone out there dealing with this today and if so, what was your solution?

[cfor]

Duplicate hosts names by itself should not be an issue - (We have 100's of hosts with the same name).

However you would need (or want to) make sure they are on different networks, attached with NAT devices.

Depending on the needs you have a few solutions might work:

attach each system to a Vapp network, and have that Vapp network NAT to the Org level networks.  At this point duplicate hostname's should not matter - as hostname would never be seen by anything outside the vapp network.

You could do the same idea, and link vapps directly to Org fenced networks.

Hope that gives some ideas, if I missunderstood, please just repost with some more details.

[sbrad001]

Thanks! I had considered that, but for our initial roll out of vCloud, I had only planned to do direct connects to the External networks.  We are a development lab, so our multi-tenancy is just the different project dev teams within our company that use our resources.  And by connecting to External networks (vlans within our lab) it keeps it simple.  In addition to this, many project teams register with our AD/DNS (and use other resources)... so it is concievable that we could now see multiple duplicate hostnames trying to register in AD.  And that is where NATing would be problematic as well.

[cfor]

We has some of the same issues, and to solve we really had to take a big step...

We require 100% of all vApps to have a vApp network.  Most the time the vApps (in a lab setup) have a domain controller inside the vApp and all needs of the vApp are inside it.  (Most the time) ...  So our setup seems a little different than your needs.

We do have a small grouping of users that are direct connected, to handle that we use a workflow solution (Symantec Workflow, or VMware Orchestrator) to do the deployments, we do not let them run if started from VCD (blocking tasks integration).  This way as part of the intantiation operation we can force custom names - but that can be a bit to setup.

[sbrad001]

Ok, thanks again!  That is actually what I am starting to look at... using vCloud Request Manager as a front end to vCD to possibly force unique names.  Looks like I am on the right track.

[bparlier]

You may want to look into Service Manager, if I remember correctly; this is what is taking the place of Request Manager.