vCloud Connector 2.0 and the VMware Cloud Service Evaluation

One source for Service Provider would be VMware’s very own Cloud Service Evaluation – which is currently in beta. The evaluation is just recently been upgraded to vCloud Director 5.1 and support vCloud Connector 2.0. I think there was originally some confusion. From the start the “vCloud Server Evaluation” wasn’t intended as production grade hosted experience – its merely intended as taster of how vCloud Director works. However, when we announced our intention build our own Hybrid Cloud solution – the two became conflated with each other. So on the day of the announcement many people thought this eval was the Hybrid Cloud – when it was just announcement – a statement of intent. Sadly, the poor evaluation got pretty hammered in this time. I guess the good intention was try and get our naming ducks in a row, but people were confused about to two different initiatives if I can call them that.

The sign-up process for the VMware Cloud Evaluation  is nice slick affair – usual suspects apply and there’s SMS PIN validation of the sign-up process which I rather like nowadays – you’ll need a credit card handy. I would recommend digging out your corporate company credit card. That’s what I did. Please don’t tell Jeff my manager. Okay? Fortunately, my friends over in the vCloud Evaluation provided me with a voucher number – so I have some credit already…

I’ve already written posts about the setup of the vCloud Connector private use already, as well as documenting the setup with a public provider like Stratogen, as well the process of copying, content sync and stretched deploy – so I won’t repeat myself.

There is PDF guide that walks you through Cloud with specific emphasis on vCloud Connector, and page 17 is where the document begins to talk about using the Cloud Evaluation with vCloud Connector:

Getting Started with vCloud Connector in the VMware Cloud Evaluation

1. The first step is to create a new user specifically to be used by the vCloud Connector itself. This can be be done under the “Administration” tab by clicking the “Add A User” button. This user must be an Organization Administrator – and no you cannot use the “admin” account generated during the sign-up process – and used as the primary login to the VMware Cloud Evaluation.

2. Next we need to head to our vCloud Connector server and register the “node” with this user account. Although you should have changed it at first logon – the vCloud Connectors default username and password is admin/vmware. Under the “Nodes” tab click the “Register Node” button.

3. As we saw with setting up Stratogen Cloud and iLand we need a couple of parameters from the “supplier” to complete the form correctly including:

• vCloud URL
• Organization Name

In the context of the Cloud Evaluation the URL for the vCloud Connector Node is: https://vccnode.vcloudservice.vmware.com. The Organization Name is created automatically, and is the 4-digit number appended to your “admin” credentials. So if my login was “admin@1234” my Organization Name would 1234.

4. The next step is adding this cloud into the UI of the vCloud Connector itself – remember this is a plug-in registered to the vCenter and accessible in the C# vSphere Client. As you might recall from my other posts on this subject – you do that by clicking the + under the “Clouds” node:

…once added I can browse da cloud and see the vApps I created earlier…

Conclusions:

I think the Cloud Eval is pretty good place to try out vCloud Connector. Try to see the evaluation is agnostic sandbox environment for folks to use for experimentation and learning. Once they finish you have finished trial, with the right knowledge and experience at hand, you can choose the Service Provider that’s right you them for a long-term commitment. We don’t encourage folks to stay a long time or run production workloads in our the evaluation. And remember this “evaluation” despite the name – has nothing to do with that big announcement a couple of weeks ago to do with launching our own Cloud platform…