{"id":11079,"date":"2011-03-14T17:02:39","date_gmt":"2011-03-14T17:02:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=11079"},"modified":"2011-03-14T17:02:39","modified_gmt":"2011-03-14T17:02:39","slug":"private-cloud-goes-into-production","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=11079","title":{"rendered":"Private Cloud Goes Into Production"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Subtitle: And How I Rolled It Out<\/p>\n<p>The company I work for is an IT\u00a0consulting firm that does all sorts from infrastructure, application (BI) consulting, and business solution development.\u00a0 My team (infrastructure) provides client services and manages our internal IT.<\/p>\n<p>Up to now, it pains me to say, it&#8217;s been all ESXi.\u00a0 It was free and it just works.\u00a0 But that free came with a price: no centralised management, and it was completely IT driven.<\/p>\n<p>A business requirement came along that I knew I could sort out with VMM 2008 R2.\u00a0 We also had a requirement for more virtualisation capacity.\u00a0 Hyper-V to the rescue &#8211; and I also saw how I could introduce a private cloud using SCVMM SSP 2.0:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It would allow the various IT consumers in the business to deploy their own VMs without waiting for availability in my team.<\/li>\n<li>We would spend less time doing repetitive lab deployments.<\/li>\n<li>We could control VM sprawl with quotas based on real GB figures (we aren&#8217;t cross charging).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So Hyper-V, VMM, and SCVMM SSP 2.0 were all installed.\u00a0 The VMM is a physical server with lots of SATA disk because I live in the library.\u00a0 Generalised VHDs for various required OSs were created.\u00a0 I created\u00a03 hardware profiles.\u00a0 From those I have\u00a03 templates for each OS version\/edition VHD.\u00a0 For example, there&#8217;s a W2008 R2 VHD with 1GB RAM, 4 GB RAM, and 8 GB RAM templates.<\/p>\n<p>SCVMM SSP 2.0 was installed in a VM.\u00a0 I wanted to separate it from VMM to give me more modularity and flexibility.\u00a0 Each team has a business unit and an infrastructure.\u00a0\u00a0 I&#8217;m creating those for the teams because &#8230; well &#8230; the forms are a little complicated and I&#8217;ll catch heat if I ask the team leaders to complete them (requiring billable time to figure them out first).\u00a0 It&#8217;s just easier if I do that stuff.\u00a0 All that remains for them is to manage their VMs.<\/p>\n<p>All the templates are imported and available to all of the infrastructures.\u00a0 Each business unit is capped by RAM and disk GB.<\/p>\n<p>For each BU, I deployed a VM based on the team&#8217;s current requirements.\u00a0 That gave me (1) a chance to test and (2) something to demonstrate with when showing them the SSP 2.0 portal.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Deployed VMs get static IPs from an SSP 2.0 managed pool.\u00a0 BGInfo displays that info on the console.\u00a0 They can &#8220;KVM&#8221; into the VMs using the portal or they can RDP in.<\/p>\n<p>BTW, I am using a signle AD group for the membership of each BU.\u00a0 Tradtional security is best.\u00a0 I temporarily use a non-admin domain user to provision each new BU and infrastructure.<\/p>\n<p>A document is on the way but these are technical people.\u00a0 I sat down with a rep from the first team earlier this afternoon and walked through the process of deploying, accessing, and destroying VMs.\u00a0 After 5 minutes of a walk through, the first consultant was rocking and rolling.<\/p>\n<p>Lessons learned?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I&#8217;m having some trouble with static IPs and W2003 R2.\u00a0 That requires more investigation and work.\u00a0 I&#8217;m thinking it&#8217;s an IC issue.<\/li>\n<li>There&#8217;s no way to mount ISO files from the library in the SSP.\u00a0 The solution I am thinking of is to reveal the original SSP from VMM.\u00a0 It&#8217;s ready and the self-service user roles are created (without VM create rights).\u00a0 That can be used to mount ISOs.\u00a0 Twice the admin work required.<\/li>\n<li>There is no way to change the spec of a deployed VM in SSP 2.0.\u00a0 That is badly needed.\u00a0 We&#8217;re making changes in VMM but SSP doesn&#8217;t see those changes, leading to &#8230;<\/li>\n<li>I find myself diving into SQL to edit stuff that is not revealed in the portal.\u00a0 For example &#8211; renaming a BU.\u00a0 Or changing the spec of a VM isn&#8217;t reflected in SSP and therefore not in the quota usage.\u00a0 That sucks.<\/li>\n<li>If SSP and VMM lose contact with each other during a VM deployment then SSP considers the job failed, even if VMM continues with it without any issues.\u00a0 SSP 2.0 needs an import feature (see next).<\/li>\n<li>SCVMM SSP 2.0 SP 1.0 is needed badly.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>I did consider using the original SSP instead of SSP 2.0.\u00a0 But the crude quota mechanism and the inability to assign static IPs was too much of a step down.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Subtitle: And How I Rolled It Out The company I work for is an IT\u00a0consulting firm that does all sorts from infrastructure, application (BI) consulting, and business solution development.\u00a0 My team (infrastructure) provides client services and manages our internal IT. Up to now, it pains me to say, it&#8217;s been all ESXi.\u00a0 It was free &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=11079\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Private Cloud Goes Into Production&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11079"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11079\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}