So, you have vCAC configured locally and now have access to vCHS vCloud Air and want to create an endpoint to provision machines to your virtual data center.
In this example, the vCloud Air account has a Virtual Private Cloud.
Background
vCloud Hybrid Service was recently renamed to vCloud Air to reflect it changing services (and to get people to stop calling it vCHeeSe). It uses a lot of vCloud Director terminology and behavior.
Preparation
- Make sure your vCloud Air account setup is completed.
- Login to your vCloud Air account
- Have credentials for an Infrastructure Admin on vCloud Automation Center
Get Information
| What? | Where? | How? |
|---|---|---|
| vCloud Air Username and Password | duh! |  |
| Virtual Data Center Name | On the Dashboard, under VIRTUAL DATA CENTERS, the top line in bold is the virtual data center name. |
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| vCloud Director API URL | Click the name of your virtual data center (it doesn’t give you the pointing-finger icon, but it is a link) to view the details. On the right, under RELATED LINKS, click “vCloud Director API URL”. Copy the value and paste it somewhere handy. |
|
| Network details | While still in the Virtual Data Center details, click the Networks tab to view a list of the defined networks. By default you’ll have a “Default-Isolated” and a “Default-Routed”. You can create more, but for this example, I’m just going to use the default-routed network. Locate the network and record the gateway IP. Make a note of the network size (/24 in this case) and the IP Range. The IP range is the range of values that vCloud Director/vCloud Air will assign to newly-created VMs in this network. |
|
Configure vCAC
- Logon to vCAC Console as an Infrastructure Administrator
- Navigate to Infrastructure/Endpoints
- Click New Endpoint/Cloud/vApp (vCloud Director)
- In the Endpoint configuration, give it a catchy name like “vCloud Air” and description.
- In the Address field, paste the vCloud Director API URL, but only up to the :443. Don’t need the path.
- In the Organization field, paste the Virtual Data Center Name – it’s case-sensitive.
- If you have Custom Properties to be applied, you can add them now or later.
- Click OK to save your endpoint
vCAC Endpoint for vCloud Air - On the list of Endpoints, mouseover the new one and choose Data Collection from the menu. On the Data Collection status page, click the Start button to begin data collection
- After the data collection completes successfully, you will be able to create or edit a fabric group to add the Virtual Data Center as a Compute resource.
Next Steps
- Create a network profile for the network(s) you recorded earlier. I suggest configuring the vCAC Network Profile IP Range to be exclusive of the vCD IP range
- Create reservations for your business groups on the vCloud Air Compute Resource
- Consider a Reservation Policy for your vCloud Air reservations
Coming Soon
I’m hoping to configure the VPN connection to extend my lab network to the virtual data center. Creating blueprints for use on vCloud Air, making existing blueprints work on vCloud Air.
Thanks to David Hill for his post about this very topic
Brian Ragazzi 