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TheVMinator
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Expert

Preparing your Environment for vCloud Automation Center / DynamicOps

What needs to be done to prepare your environment to implement DynamicOps?  Are there design considerations specific to implementing DynamicOps fo self-provisioning for the first time that need to be taken into consideration?  Is there a "checklist" that I should go down to make sure that I'm ready to implement it?

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harkamal
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Have you seen the installation docs for vCac ? It talks about pre-requisites in good detail.

basically, you need a database + vCac server to get started.

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harkamal
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http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vcac-pubs.html

have a look at reference architecture and install guide.

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TheVMinator
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Thanks, however I had read those documents and found they didn't really speak to some questions I had.  For example:

Is there anything I need to think about on the network layer when I begin to use DynamicOps for the first time?

Do I need to look at how vLans are trunked, so that VMs provisioned by Dynamic Ops can have IPs configured for a subnet where they have connectivity, based on the cluster that VCAC places them?  What about naming of port groups or use of vDS - does an optimized design of VCAC require me to think about these things?

What about storage?  What do I need to do if anything to prepare for VCAC choosing a datastore for VMs it creates?  Should I look at my SDRS configuration and profile driven storage configuration to make VCAC able to use storage more seamlessly?

DynamicOps is using templates to provision VMs.  What do I need to think about relating to those templates? Will they be used identically as when I was provisioning manually by cloning from a template?

What about compute layer design and HA/DRS cluster configurations?  Any considerations here?

It seems like this installation document only tells you how to turn VCAC on but doesn't bring in any wider considerations / impacts.    

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admin
Immortal
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If the documents aren't sufficient in whole I'd recommend posting each of these questions individually on here unless you're working with our sales and services organization in a jumpstart program to answer some of these technical details.

I'd look at network profiles on the host reservation level which allows you to set the network settings on a cluster.

As far as storage DRS, support for SDRS is not generally available.  Storages is directly provisioned to datastores, you can choose to reserve a subset of availble stores and prioritize them.  In addition there is a storage policy so you can group these.

Templates usually are a subset of clones, for example WinXPLarge, WinXPSmall, WinXPApproval, etc, these all use the same template but have different business rules and customization after clone.

HA and DRS should be in the the reference architecture and install that is published.  Usually all sites go behind web farms, databases clustered, the only consideration is that there is a service that cannot be active/active configuration so there has to be a failover procedure.  There are plans to resolve this which requires concurrency planning testing.