VMware vCloud Director – Base Organization – Part 7

VMware vCloud Director – Creating a Base Organization

In Part 7 of this VMware vCloud Director series we look at creating a base organization that will include catalogs and vapp templates.

vCloud Director – Creating the Base Organization

1. Login to your vCloud Director cell if you are not logged in already. Click on step 5 Create a New Organization. The New Organization wizard will begin where you can type in your Organization Name, Organization Full Name and a Description

2. For LDAP options we will select Do not use LDAP, however you can see a few other options are available which allow you to hook into external LDAP providers

3. We’ll add a local admin user called adminsa. Click on the Add button followed by the User Name, Password and Full Name. For Quotas we will select unlimited for all.

4. The local user has been created and assigned the Organization Administrator role. Click Next.

5. Under Catalog options we will select Allow sharing catalogs to other organizations. If you wish to publish the catalog externally you can also select Allow publishing external catalogs. This is not necessary though, I just select it for testing later on.

6. Within Email Preferences I will use the default SMTP server setup within my vCloud Director cell as well as the system default notification settings. However feel free to change these options to suite your environment.

7. For our base organization we want to set all leases to Never Expire and all quotas to unlimited.

8. A summary of all the options we’ve selected is displayed. Once you are ready click finish.

9. We now have another green tick for step 5

10. Click on step 6, Allocate resources to an organization. Here we are going to create a Virtual Datacenter under the organization we created earlier. Select the organization.

11. Select the Provider VDC which we will utilize resources from

12. There are 3 allocation models available for VDC’s. For our base organization we will be using the Pay-As-You-Go model.

13. I have set the following resources for CPU: Quota Unlimited, resources guaranteed 20% (default), vCPU speed 2GHz. For memory I have select the following: Quota Unlimited, resources guaranteed 20% (default). Lastly for maximum number of vm’s allowed within this VDC, I have selected Unlimited.

14. This now brings us to storage allocation. Utilizing our storage policies I have allocated 50GB from Platinum, Gold, Silver and 100GB from Bronze. My default installation policy will be to install to Gold Storage Policy. I have also enabled thing provisioning

15. I will use the Provider VXLAN Network Pool and give a quota of 10 networks for this VDC.

16. Next is to configure an edge gateway (firewall). Select Create a new edge gateway and ive the gateway a name. I will select the compact deployment.

17. We only have 1 external network to choose from in our lab, I will select External-Net-1 and click the Add button.

18. I will now create an external network for our VDC. Click on Create a network for this virtual datacenter connected to this new edge gateway and give the network a name. Type in the gateway address you wish to use on this network along with the network subnet mask and DNS.

19. Under Static IP Pool, allocate a range of IP’s that will be allocated to your virtual machines. In my example I will use 172.16.0.10 – 172.16.0.20

20. Type a name for this Virtual Data Center

21. Review the summary and click Finish.

22. We are then brought back to the home screen. Next we will configure our AMQP broker settings.

vCloud Director – AMQP Broker Settings

23. Click on Administration – System Settings – Extensibility. Scroll down to AMQP Broker Settings. Type in the IP address of your AMQP Host.

24. Scroll down and type in the User Name and Password you setup in my previous tutorial – RabbitMQ install

25. Scroll back to the top and click on Test AMQP Connection. You should see an AMQP Connection Successded message

26. Lets verify that we are seeing some AMQP messages come through. SSH to the server running RabbitMQ and type:

rabbitmqctl list_connections (You should see your vCloud Director Cell in this list)
rabbitmqctl list_exchanges (You should see the vcd.notifications entry)

27. Return back to the home screen. Next we will create our first Catalog.

vCloud director – Creating a Catalog

28. Click on Add a Catalog to an Organization. Select the Organization you wish to add the catalog to.

29. Give the catalog a name and description

30. Select the Storage Policy to use for this catalog. As the main purpose of this catalog is to store ISO images, I will select the Bronze Storage Policy.

31. Optionally if you wish to Enable External Publishing you can enable this setting.

32. A summary of your settings are displayed. Click Finish.

33. Under the System Tab in vCloud Director, click on Manage & Monitor – Organizations – your Organization.

34. Select Catalogs and click on ISO-IMAGES

35. Click on Media & Other and click on the little hard disk with the green arrow pointing up. We’ll now upload an ISO image.

36. I click on Local File – Browse and select the ISO image I wish to upload. I also type a Description for this image.

37. The ISO image starts uploading

38. Once the image has finished you will see it listed under the Media & Other tab. In this example I’ve also uploaded a few more ISO images.

Disclaimer:
All the tutorials included on this site are performed in a lab environment to simulate a real world production scenario. As everything is done to provide the most accurate steps to date, we take no responsibility if you implement any of these steps in a production environment.