Posts tagged VMware
vCloud Director 1.5 cannot upload files error
Sep 5th
Let’s say you have your vCloud Director cells behind a load balancer.
You try to upload your files (.iso and .ovf images for either a vApp or media and receive an error message like:
Error: Transferring files
On page 98 of the vdc_15_admin_guide.pdf you will find a paragraph pointing out that you need to fill in the API field for uploads to work.
During the initial configuration of each cloud cell, you specified an HTTP service IP address. By default, vCloud Director uses that address in the XML responses from the REST API and as the upload target for the transfer service (for uploading vApp templates and media). To use a different address, specify a public REST API base URL.
I had missed that in my new setup of vCloud Director 1.5 and a helpful VMware employee answered my questions in the Communities.
Install of vCloud Director 1.5 fails to set up ESXi 4.1U1 hosts
Sep 5th
According to the install documentation, VMware vSphere 4 ESX and ESXi 4.1 update 1 are supported.
Install or upgrade to vCloud Director 1.5 will fail with the following error when trying to add the provider vDC:
Could not retrieve state for sequence: seq_os
This is easily fixed by editing the database table [os_id] and inserting the relevant information.
vCloud Director Cluster got you down?
Apr 27th
vCloud Director – the VMware solution to building on-demand infrastructure for the enterprise and cloud computing…works.
But there are some trials you must encounter and complete before things work smoothly.
TL;DR: I failed at first but found the problem with the issue being firewall services blocking inter-cell communications. This post is about the log entry and how it isn’t very clear that there is an error to resolve.
A storage cluster is born
May 19th
It is time to add space to our VMware cluster for storage of VMs for our customers.
We started initially using Compellent SAN storage. Worked well, had a lot of space, but the performance was not what I was looking for (it is all SATA based), using F/C is far more complicated than we need for this project, and just plain expensive to upgrade (adding a shelf of 16 450GB SAS disks is more expensive than the solution presented here).
Spin forward a few months, I took one of our older NetApp FAS270c systems and ripped out the 73GB 10K disks, went to eBay and purchased 2 shelves of 300GB 10K F/C disks and after an afternoon of shuffling we had ourselves a cluster for storage. Performance is absolutely great (and predictable). Expanding it? Expensive, just like the Compellent, and I also wanted to investigate some of the new things that can be done with storage, like inline (and synchronous) compression and data deduplication.
History lesson: Years and years ago I did a lot with Solaris and I have kept my feet wet playing with OpenSolaris and ZFS. I won’t bore you with the great details of why ZFS is the shit (links at the bottom of the post) or why Solaris needs to live on forever (because no one can thread at the kernel level like Solaris), but I will tell you that using Solaris (or OpenSolaris) with ZFS is a combination that is very tough to beat. So last year I used the Sun Try-and-Buy program to test out a 7110 and I absolutely loved the interface, and the price drop that occurred while I had it! But someone within Sun decided that no, as a TaB customer the new pricing is not available. I was floored by this. I shipped back the 7110, and anyway, I really wanted a cluster, not a single head, single JBOD enclosure.
In the end I wanted a cluster!
That’s 2 heads, automatic failover, etherchannel/trunk/IPMP/LACP oh hell, I just wanted multiple ethernets bound together if possible, basic reporting (I can SNMP for the real stuff), and finally, a price tag that I can feel good about for storage of our customer data.
This is where NexentaStor comes in! They have the pieces all put together so I don’t have to self-engineer something. I have a vendor I can harass or ask questions of. I can focus on what makes my business work instead of working to make my business stable.
