vCloud Director on AWS

My colleague Lyubomir Lyubenov from VMware OneCloud team (OneCloud is internal huge vCloud Director based cloud for field enablement) recently published VCDonAWS CloudFormation templates with which you can deploy vCloud Director management components under 30 minutes on AWS.

I have seen customer (Service Providers) asking what is it for and what it means for the vCloud Director future. Let me give you my own view.

What is it?

vCloud Director is one of a few VMware products that is not provided in form of virtual appliances. The vCloud Director binaries can be installed on any compatible Linux virtual or physical machine and that means it can be installed anywhere – even on EC2 instances running on AWS. The VCDonAWS project in a clever way uses AWS resources (not VMC on AWS!) to deploy vCloud Director management stack from a single CloudFormation template. It leverages VPC (optionally stretched across 2 availability zones) for the networking, EC2 instances for jumphosts and vCloud Director cells, PostgreSQL RDS for vCloud Director database, S3 (S3FS) for vCloud Director transfer share (although this will be in the future replaced with Elastic File System for better performance), Elastic Load Balancers (for UI/API and ConsoleProxy cells) and even Auto Scaling Groups to automatically deploy additional VCD cells. The certificates are provided with AWS Certificate Manager.

The following picture taken from the VCDonAWS website shows the overall architecture.

What is it not?

As you can see above it only deploys the vCloud Director management components. You will still need to attach resource vCenter Servers/NSX Manager pairs and these obviously cannot be running on (native) AWS. You cannot even use VMC on AWS instances (at least not yet) as they have RBAC and VC/NSX inventory access limitations which prevent vCloud Director from working properly.

Cassandra VM metric datastore and RabbitMQ messaging bus optional components are not deployed either although I see no reason why they should not run on AWS.

Is it supported?

No. The deployment uses unsupported OS – Amazon Linux (the CentOS deployment option is not working at the time of writing).

Why?

Beside the OneCloud team use case which I cannot speak here about I see it as a very nice proof of concept of how VCD deployment can be automated. How simply it can be done with infrastructure as code approach. And obviously once VMC on AWS restrictions will be resolved these two can be used together to provide multitenant VMware platform IaaS.

Try it yourself!

If you have AWS account try it yourself and really in about an hour you can have a deployed vCloud Director instance.

Here are some tips:

• Use only US regions as the provided templates do not have AMI mappings for other regions
• Use Amazon Linux HVM as base operating system for Bastion and cell hosts (CentOS option is not working)
• For VCD installation ID do not use 7-9 due to bug in verification regex.
• You will need VCD binary uploaded in an S3 bucket. I used VCD 9.1 GA bits. You will also need working license key.
• You will need certificate (even self signed) uploaded to Certification Manager.
• And lastly generate key pair  for accessing bastion hosts and cells.

Cloud Formation Input Dialog

 

 

Stack Deployment

 

vCloud Director Cells

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Limit Maximum vCPU/RAM Configuration of vCloud Director VM

Some times ago I wrote about an undocumented feature that allows to limit maximum disk size for VM in vCloud Director. I was asked numerous times if there is similar setting for vCPU and RAM maximums. Today I discovered there is, however it should be considered an experimental feature. I still find it useful as misconfigured VM with extremely large number of vCPUs or huge RAM will impact the host it is running on and cause excessive swapping or high CPU ready times so it is in best interest of the vCloud Director system administrator to prevent it. The other option is to use blocking tasks as described here: CPU and Memory Limit enforcement for vCloud Director and in a blog here.

The limit is set with cell-management-tool command on any cell. Restart of the cell is not necessary.

$VCLOUD_HOME/bin/cell-management-tool manage-config -n vmlimits.memory.limit -v 65536
$VCLOUD_HOME/bin/cell-management-tool manage-config -n vmlimits.cpu.numcpus -v 16

The settings in the example above will limit maximum size of a VM to 16 vCPUs and 64 GB RAM.

Some observations:

• The limit is vCloud Director instance wide and also applies to system administrators
• VM with resources set above the limit will fail to be powered on with an error:
  The operation could not be performed, because there are no more CPU resources
  or
  The operation could not be performed, because there are no more Memory resources
• It can be cheated by using CPU or memory hot add and adding resource beyond the limits to an already powered on VM

Again, consider it an experimental feature and use at your own risk.

What’s New in vCloud Director 9.1

vCloud Director version 9.1 has been released. It has been just 6 months since the previous release (9.0) so VMware is delivering on its promise of multiple yearly releases in 6 months cadence.

In this whitepaper you can find  high level overview of some of the new features. Let me summarize them and also provide additional ones here below.

H5 UI Enhancements

In iterative process the HTML 5 UI is slowly replacing legacy Flex UI. The tenant portion now includes vApp, Catalog and Networking management functionality, OVF/ISO download/uploads without the need for Client Integration Plugin (hooray!) and support for standalone VMware Remote Console.

Associated organizations from multiple or single (new in 9.1) vCloud Director instances now have aggregated view of all Org VDCs with seamless UI redirections between instances.

SDK for UI Extensibility has been released which means the service provider can extend the UI with additional sections to provide access to new services. The SDK includes very simple example of a static page extension (e.g. terms of service, links to other services or price lists) and upcoming vCAT-SP whitepaper will show how to do more complex ones.

The H5 UI is now also used in provider context but only for new features related to vRealize Orchestrator extensibility configuration.

Both legacy UIs (provider and tenants) are still available until the full feature parity is achieved.

vRealize Orchestrator Integration

Updated vRealize Orchestrator plugin has been released. This means both providers and tenants can automate and orchestrate repeating tasks in vCloud Director.

What is completely new is the ability to integrate any vRealize Orchestrator workflows into vCloud Director UI and essential provide XaaS (anything as a service). Similar to vRealize Automation XaaS.

External Tools

Not specifically tied with vCloud Director 9.1 but fully supported now are:

• vcd-cli Linux command line tool to easily trigger or script common vCloud Director tasks (both for provider and tenant).
• Container Service Extension Ability to extend vCloud Director to be target for deployment of Kubernetes clusters for tenants and simple management through CLI.
• Object Extensibility SDK
• Security Hardening Guide (long overdue update): PDF HTML

Other Features and Changes

• Org VDC network disconnection and connection from Org VDC Edge Gateway. This allows movements of network between Edges without impact on the connected VMs.
• NFV features (SR-IOV, Large Page VMs, and guaranteed sensitivity support).
• FIPS mode can be enabled on Org VDC Edge Gateways
• vCloud Director 9.1 maximums now include support for 150 ms RTT latency between management components (vCloud cells, vSphere, NSX) and 2000 Edges in single vCloud Director instance
• VM monitoring metrics now via API provide also roll up metrics for vApp, Org VDC and Org objects.
• Multisite enhancements: associations of orgs within the same vCloud Director instance, multisited API queries and rollup calls
• Removed support for old vCloud API versions (1.5, 5.1): make sure you update your scripts or applications to use at least version 5.5 APIs (e.g. Usage Meter).
• vCloud Director no longer registers itself as an extension to resource vCenter Servers (upgraded instances will not delete the extension registration).

What’s New in vCloud Availability 2.0.1

Minor patch of vCloud Availability 2.0.1 was released last week. Besides many bug fixes, improved documentation and support for Cassandra version 3.x I want to highlight two undocumented features and add upgrade comment.

Provider vSphere Web Client Plugin

This is a return from 1.0 version of an  experimental feature, where the provider can monitor state of vSphere Replication Manager Server, vSphere Replication Servers and all incoming and outgoing replications from inside the vSphere Web Client plugin in the particular (provider side) vCenter Server. This is especially useful for quick troubleshooting.

vRMS Status

vRS Status

Replication Status

Complex vSphere SSO Domain Support

Although it is not recommended to have multiple vCloud Director / vCloud Availability instances sharing the same vSphere SSO domain, it is now possible to accommodate such scenario. The reason why it is not recommended is, that it creates unnecessary dependency between the instances, limits upgradability and scale of each instance.

Upon startup vSphere Replication Cloud Service (vRCS) is querying SSO Lookup Service for Cassandra nodes and resource vCenter Servers. In order to limit the scope of such query to only those that belong to the particular vCloud Availability instance, create text file /opt/vmware/hms/conf/sites on all vRCS nodes with SSO site names that should be queried (one line per site).

Update 5/2/2018

There might be some confusion between vCenter SSO domain and vCenter SSO site. vCenter SSO domain name is usually vsphere.local and the domain is defined by the span of all replicated PCSs. Any single node contains all replicated data, such us IdP configurations, lookup service registrations, solution users, tags, license information, etc.

vCenter SSO domain can contain multiple SSO sites. The first site name is defined with the first PSC deployment (in vSphere 6.7 the default name is default-site).

The other SSO sites are created when joining an existing SSO domain.

So based on the example above, the /opt/vmware/hms/conf/sites file could have single line with text string default-site. vRCS will then ignore any other SSO sites in this vsphere.local domain.

Upgrade Options

You can upgrade to vCloud Availability 2.0.1 both from version 1.0.x and 2.0, however you need to use different upgrade ISO images for upgrading of the replication components (vRMS, vRCS and vRS). The installer and UI appliances are redeployed fresh as they are all stateless.

 

vRealize Orchestrator Client with 4K Screen

This is a quick tip for those that want to run vRealize Orchestrator client on 4K screen in Windows 10 and cannot see anything because the font is so tiny and does not scale. The full credit goes to @joerglew who published in on our internal Socialcast but I have not seen it on public internet.

Download the client.jnlp file from the https://vro-address:8281/vco/client/client.jnlp (the Start Orchestrator Client link).

Edit the file in notepad and add line <property name=”sun.java2d.dpiaware” value=”false”/> into the resources section of the xml.

That’s it. Enjoy nice large font on your 4K screen.