Fenced vApp Templates Published Across Organization

[JayhawkEric]

We are working on our POC with vCloud Director to replace Lab Manager.  Currently we have 10 organizations which are mostly segregated by departments and they do not work together, other than to use our base Library. We use Electric Cloud to do daily builds of new configurations with our latest software in it and then share it to all organizations.

In vCD we setup the network for the vApp and captured it to a published catalog. When a user from another organization adds it to their cloud it does not automatically select their organizational network, like LM4 does.  I even tried naming them the same, which it allows us to do. We would have to train each user to go in and modify the network for each VM within the vApp.

Our other choice is to have 1 organization for everyone but I'm not sure how to change the network setttings depending on what area of the company they are in as well.

Has anyone else tried this? Maybe I'm missing something within our network setup or it isn't possible to automate.  Not sure some of our users will be able to handle this, even though it's only 6 mouse clicks.

Thanks for any info/help!!!

Eric

[mcfadyenj]

you can use vCO to drive the deployment of a the vApp and succesive configuration of NAT / fw rules etc.

then use vco as the login portal via the webOperator or custom portal. If you have vSM you could use that to kick things off as well.

one thing we have been doing is skipping the org network and direct connecting to a vlan backed external which doesn't allow cross vApp but does allow external machines to come in over a NAT'd internal / external connection.

you can also use multiple segments inside the vApp and link them using static routes on the vSE boxes.

but again you in the same situation your currently trying to avoid.

vCO is a little trickier than vCD but will provide the results you are after.

[JayhawkEric]

mcfadyenj,

Thanks for the info. 

We are using a direct connection to a VLAN backed external network for our organization network as 99% of the vApps for these organizations will not need to talk to each other.  I see no reason to add another layer of networking within them, unless it'll allow me to publish across organizations without users needing to make changes to the vApp before starting them.

We do have the capability to write our own portal as we are doing that for another project as well but didn't want to go down that road unless we had to.

Eric

[mcfadyenj]

although I have not tried this I expect you should be able to publish across org by static routes to the vSE boxes. (I have not tested how segmentation works across orgs) in respect to the vSE devices.

I would make an assumption cross org should be fine, something I think I will tinker with just for curiosities sake.

[JayhawkEric]

Let me know what you see in your testing.  We have a VMware vCD SME coming out on Tuesday and hope to get this working.

Our other issue is the 500 VM's per Org limit.  Our development organization currently has 505 VM's and that number is only going to grow.

[admin]

This is partly due to the fact that the vApp based network and it's associated vSE gets undeployed when you power off the vApp.  When you insert it into the catalog, then redeploy it, it will most likely be looking for a UID associated wth the network that it was attached to.  That is probably why trying to use the same name is still not working.  Out of the box I am not aware of a way to force this to connect to the other ORG network on deployment without something like vCO to make that change after it has been deployed to update the network config on the vApp network.

I suspect this is the expected behaviour, but it may be worth openeing a case with GSS to see if it is in fact expected and if there is a way other than vCO to change the connection

As far as the limits go, it is what it is as they say, I am not sure it is a hard limited though.

[JayhawkEric]

Chris,

That's what I was thinking, and makes sense with the design concepts put in place for vCD.

As painful as it is it looks like we'll either need to write our out front-end for the environment in order to use vCD as a replacement for LM or go with another product.  Our environment is way to big, and rapidly growing, to be useable by standard vCD constraints.

Eric

[admin]

I would still recommend if you do your own portal that you look into Orchestrator to help facilitate that.  Of course you can use the vCloud API's to change the network connection post deployment.  It really depends on how much you want to code up front, or leverage an orchestration engine in between to do the work for you.

[JayhawkEric]

I'm heading down the Orchestrator path already to see what I can get it to do. 

With 2700 deployments each month, and growing, the system needs to be simple and smooth.  That will be the determining factor for which way we go.

[mcfadyenj]

I have written some custom vCO workflows that are used to mass deploy customised setups to give a similar result to a vApp without fw / nat.

That was giving good results and it ports to any size environment.

I was using XML and iterating lists of servers / ip's etc. This worked well however in a dev / test config it was a little cumbersome. Sure was a lot cheaper than the vCD route though.

[JayhawkEric]

John,

We have to use Fenced/NAT'd for our configurations as our software is tied into the IP/DNS of the VM.  We really like having Host Spanning capabilities as well so we can do upgrades and maintenance with minimum downtime to our developers/QC/Support staff.

Also, we have 32 licenses for LM which gives us 1280 vCD VM's.  That's a lot of licensing out the door to drop VCD and go down another path.  We will if we have to but we still have over a year before we really need to fully head down that path.

If we can't get it working any time soon hopefully the next release will be of more use to us.

[mcfadyenj]

I wouldn't suggest dropping LM for my scripts, the scripts were written for sites without LM or VCD.

they are certainly no match for full blown LM or VCD.

On another note you mentioned you would get 1280 vm's for 32 LM licenses. That is about 40:1 ratio. Our SE tells me we would only get 10:1.

Did you get some special deal or was this the standard LM to vm over VCD ratio?

[JayhawkEric]

We were told by our sales rep and at VMworld it is 40:1 for any LM licenses purchased before September 1st, 2010.  Any bought after that date is a 20:1 ratio.