This is because the virtual machine has to wait for the amount of allocated vCPUs (logical CPUs) to become available so that the CPU instructions can be scheduled on multiple cores on the physical host.  The higher the number of vCPUs, the more cores that must be available for each execution.

When you migrate a virtual machine into vCloud Director from an existing physical server you may find that the server previously had many cores that may no longer be required.  If an application such as Microsoft SQL is using 8 cores on a physical server it is best practice to reduce the number of CPUs associated with the virtual machine to a lower number such as 2 vCPUs.  Each application will have different CPU demands and so it is best to use performance monitoring tools to determine how much of a bottleneck CPU is for your application.  You can do this in Microsoft Windows with Performance Monitor.

Once you have determined the appropriate amount of vCPUs that are required for your virtual machine reduce the amount of vCPUs using the steps below.

Note: The virtual machine must be powered off to perform these steps.

1. Right-click on the virtual machine and click Properties.
2. Click Hardware tab.
3. Use the Number of CPUs drop-down to lower the vCPU count by 1.
4. Click OK.
5. If your virtual machine still experiences performance issues, and if its kernel or HAL can handle switching to a single vCPU, lower the vCPU count to 1.
   
   
   Warning: If your virtual machine’s kernel or HAL cannot handle switching to a single vCPU, unexpected behaviour may occur.  This is typical of Windows Server Operating Systems so don’t lower multi-cored virtual machines below 2 vCPUs.

So the team at StratoGen set about thinking of new & innovative ways to do this with the platform and tools that we already have in place.  Here’s where StratoGen VMware Hosting with vCloud Director comes in.

The most recent requirement was to be able to automatically spin up a trial VM instance with the ISV application on it, and for the trial to automatically expire after a defined period.

The solution was this:

1. Create a ‘Pay As You Go’ (PAYG) Virtual Datacentre on the StratoGen VMware Hosting platform – PAYG customers pay for resources by the hour as they are consumed.
2. Set the Runtime & Storage leases to the required software trial length, as defined by the ISV (this can be set to as short as 1 hour)
3. Create a vApp template containing a Virtual Machine pre loaded with the ISV application
4. Call on the vCloud API to deploy the trial machine from the vApp Template (eg from a web signup form)
5. Pull IP address information for the deployed VM out of the vCloud API and pass this back to the trialist so they can access the VM with the trial software on it

With the Runtime & Storage leases set to the required trial length, the trial VM will automatically power off and be deleted when the lease expires, thus minimising the cost of the trial for the ISV.

In this particular scenario, a trial VM needed 2 x vCPU, 4GB RAM and 50GB storage.  The ISV wanted their trial to last for 2 hours just to give their customers a taste.

The cost of the infrastructure for this trial – just over US$1!

A neat solution requiring little or no custom integration, other than a little development into the vCloud API.

If you like the sound of this, there is plenty of documentation on the vCloud API which you can find on VMware’s website here

And of course if you want to test vCloud API integration you can do so with a StratoGen VMware Hosting 7 Day Free Trial

You can of course choose to provision a full clone should you wish.

Fast provisioning can be found in the Virtual Datacentre properies. A tick in the ‘enable fast provisioning’ box is all that is required.

Provisioning other resources are also significantly faster with this upgrade.

StratoGen were one the first VMware hosting providers globally to build out a platform based on vCloud Director and the product continues to go from strength to strength. These performance improvements are a welcome addition to an already powerful and sophisticated application.

For further information please download the vCloud Director v1.5 user manual from http://www.stratogen.com/support/downloads/vcd_15_users_guide.pdf

The recently redesigned StratoGen website now caters for US based customers under the StratoGen.com URL.

US Dollar pricing for StratoGen VMware Hosting Services can be found on StratoGen.com, and customers signing up for a 7 day free trial on StratoGen.com are automatically provisioned on our US vCloud Director platform.

US customers can contact a StratoGen solutions consultant on our USA toll free number 1-877-778-2260, or via our LiveChat service.

US customers benefit from the same enterprise class infrastructure as the UK StratoGen cloud, with tier 3 datacentre facilities, high performance NetApp SAN storage and VMware Enterprise Plus licensing.  And international customers can now choose if they want to be hosted in the UK, US or both.

We’re excited about 2012 and look forward to working with you on your VMware Hosting solution requirements!

Come and visit us on Stand H45 in the VMware Partner Zone, opposite the Veeam Cloud Lab.  You can pre-register online if you have not done so already.

Our VMware certfied staff will be on hand to walk you through the interface and to answer any questions you may have about hosting your applications on StratoGen’s cloud infrastructure.

We’ll show you just how easy it is to get online and start building and deploying cloud resources right from your browser.

Hosted out of Denver, Colorado, StratoGen’s US based VMware hosting offering will be based on the same high quality, enterprise grade components as our European cloud platform.  High spec blade servers coupled with high performance NetApp SAN storage will deliver the same stunning performance enjoyed by our European clients.

Our international expansion has been driven by significant interest in StratoGen from US based customers.  We already deal with a number of US based customers who want UK based hosting, but many more US customers would like to do business with us who don’t want their data hosted outside the US.  Taking our cloud ‘across the pond’ will enable us to fulfil those requirements.

StratoGen customers will now be able to choose which side of the Atlantic they wish to host their data, and larger international organisations will be able to spread their infrastructure between Europe and the US to improve response times and increase resilience.  Dedicated layer 2 connectivity between StratoGen’s UK & US clouds will enable transatlantic data replication for DR purposes, and customers will be able to manage their cloud infrastructure from any browser using the advanced vCloud Director web portal.

We’ll be launching our US based offering in conjunction with our new look StratoGen website in Q4 2011 so watch this space for more announcements.

Firstly, make sure the VM or vApp you want to download is powered off.  Simply click the ‘Stop’ button once you’ve selected the vApp otr VM you want to download:

Before we can download the vApp or VM, we must first copy it into the ‘Organisation Catalogue’.  If you have not yet created an organisation catalogue, follow the steps in this earlier blog post here.

To copy your vApp or VM into the catalogue, right click on it and choose ‘Add to Catalog…’:

You’ll see a pop up box with a few options – the important ones are the radio boxes at the bottom.  If you want to use this vApp or VM as a template for ‘cookie cutter’ provisioning, make sure you choose ‘Customize VM Settings’.  You’ll need to ensure you have an up to date version of VMware tools on each VM if you choose this option.  If you’re downloading to use in a test & dev environment, or just a straightforward migration, choose ‘Make Identical Copy’:

Select the catalogue you want to save the vApp/VM to from the drop down menu (if you only have one it will default to it) and hit OK.  Click on the ‘Catalogs’ button and you should see a progress bar showing you how far through the copy you are:

Once the copy has finished, right click on the vApp or VM you want to download and select ‘Download’ which will pop up a window allowing you to choose where you want to save the files.  Select your download location, and you’re done!  Your vApp will be downloaded and saved to your local machine – you can then import it onto another cloud for deployment there.



This concern has existed since long before the term ‘Cloud Computing’ was coined.  Businesses have been outsourcing their hosting for years, and outages in any IT solution are inevitable.  With Cloud they tend to affect more customers simutaneoulsy than with traditional hosting models, but it’s true to say that IT infrastructure has come a long way in recent years, so such outages are now few and far between.

The frequency of outages does not however stop customers from rightly being concerned about how their data and applications will be managed – availability, security and data loss being the key concerns raised by most prospective clients.  It’s impossible for clients to cover all the bases when selecting a provider, but by asking a few key questions before committing, and comparing the answers, you should be able to get a feel for how they compare.  In addition to using the answers to compare and contrast different cloud providers, you should compare against your own infrastructure – if a cloud provider is not going to do a better job than you – either in terms of enhanced flexibility/availability or reduced cost – then you must ask yourself why you are bothering?

At StratoGen we get asked all sorts of questions about our Cloud Hosting platform, but here I’m going to list 5 that I think everyone should ask of their Cloud provider, which cover off most of the key concerns.  Sure there are plenty more questions you could ask, but these are the ones I think you should ask,

• What happens to my servers or applications in the event of a hardware failure or a total datacentre blackout?

Your Cloud Provider should be using a self healing infrastructure so that failure of any individual hardware compenent should in the very worst case only result in a automated reboot.  Not all cloud providers will offer geographic resilience as standard, but datacentre blackouts are rare and tend to be of short duration.  You should however check that your data is backed up to another site, should the worst happen.

• How is my data secured?

Security requirements vary from client to client so there is no one size fits all solution.  You should consider network security, data security (you’ll be on shared storage) and don’t forget portal security – it’s no use having a great firewall in place in front of your servers, if you can log on to your cloud account with an insecure password and console directly onto your machines!

• Where is my data stored?

Data Location is a big issue for many businesses, and often personal data is goverened by local laws – you should check that you are not breaching any laws by storing your data in a prohibited country.

• How is my data backed up?

Check data backup is included, and that the frequncy and retention period is suitable for your needs.  Ask about application awareness, restore procedures, time to initiate restore etc.  Most businesses can tolerate some downtime, few can tolerate loss of data and it is up to you to ensure that the backup procedures offered by your cloud provider will adequately protect your data.

• Please can you give me a list of outages or problems experienced in the past 12 months?

Every provider has issues, big and small.  From disk failures to network outages to power failures, we all suffer from time to time.   If your provider tells you they have had no issues, they are probably lying.  Get them to tell you about the issues and how they affected other clients – this will give you a feel for their openness – you could also check this with their reference customers.

Whichever provider you choose, plan for failure, as you would when building your own IT infrastructure.

Everybody’s talking about it.  The ‘C’ word is cropping up in conversation everywhere.  It’s even making it into prime time consumer TV advertising thanks to our friends at Microsoft.  But ‘Doing Cloud’ means many different things to different people, and IT vendors everywhere are jumping on the bandwagon labelling their services as ‘Cloud’ or ‘Cloud Based’.

Consequently, IT managers and business owners are listening in and they are all coming to the same conclusion – ‘we’ve got to Do Cloud!’  But what interests me is that many have no idea what this means to them or their business, and therefore have no idea what it is that they are going to do.

Many companies in the IT Channel fear for their future as customers shift all their services to the cloud and cut resellers and distributors out of the loop.  But this fear, in my view,  is completely unfounded –this desire in the market to ‘Do Cloud’ coupled with the lack of understanding about what this really means represents one of the greatest opportunities for IT companies this millennium.

The way I see it, the role of the IT channel is to demistify (pun intended) ‘Doing Cloud’ for their customers.  Sure they can all go onto the web and procure services direct from cloud vendors with their credit cards – but how is this any different to the way IT has always operated?  Customers have almost always been able to buy hardware or software direct if they really wanted to.  But they didn’t.

Customer’s need guidance when purchasing IT, to ensure that what they purchase is going to do the job they need it to do in their business.  This fact has not changed, just because IT is moving to delivery ‘as a service’ models.  Customers still need this guidance, they still need to procure different services from different vendors and combine them together as solutions.

What needs to change is the vendors that the IT Channel partners with.  Many traditional vendors will be transitioning their models to ‘as a service’ but there are a whole host of new vendors offering cloud services which need the IT channel to help get their services to market.  StratoGen is one such vendor – we’re keen to recruit new partners in the IT channel for our VMware Hosting ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ solutions.  But we’re not alone in this regard, nor are we a one stop shop for ‘Doing Cloud’.  Most cloud vendors operate in their own particular niche, offering a component which does not in itself represent a solution.  We need the channel to bring these components together to really help their customers ‘Do Cloud’.

You’ll need a vCloud Director solution from StratoGen, either SHARP or Private Cloud. There are 2 ways to get your images across – one is to use the new free ‘vCloud Connector’ vCentre plugin from VMware – I’m not going to describe this method as one of our beta testers has done this for me on his own blog here. This is the best way with the fewest steps, and you will be able to manage your private and public clouds from a single pane of glass,   If you don’t have access to the plugin, you can of course move your images manually, and here’s how.

Before logging in to your StratoGen Cloud, you’ll need to ensure that your Virtual Machines are in the correct format for importing into the cloud – they’ll need to be exported to .ovf (Open Virtual Machine Format).  To do this, simply fire up your vSphere Client, find the Virtual Machine image that you want to export in vCenter, power it down, then select ‘File’ , ‘Export’, then ‘Export OVF Template’:

Choose where you are going to save your VMware Image file (I’m saving mine to the desktop):

And finally wait while the export process completes:

Once you’ve created the files you need, login to the StratoGen vCloud Director platform:

Then you’re going to need to add your VMware image files to the vCloud Director catalogue, before deploying them into your Virtual Datacentre.  To add the files to the catalogue, you’ll first need to create one.  Click on the ‘Catalogs’ button and then the green ‘+’ to add a new catalogue:

Give the catalogue a name and click through the wizard:

One you’ve created your catalogue, open it up, click on the upload button and then browse to the location that you exported the VMware Image file to, which in my case was the desktop:

Select ONLY the .ovf file – the export process will have created a couple of other files but you don’t need to worry about these – the import process will pick them up:

Click the ‘upload’ button in the catalogue wizard, then wait for the import to the catalogue to complete:

The time taken to upload the VMware Image will depend on the size of the image, and the speed of your upload connection.  Once the upload has completed we are then able to deploy the .ovf into our vCloud Virtual Datacentre.  In my demo account I already have a couple of vApps set up, so I’m going to add the uploaded VM to one of my existing vApps.

To do this, open up the vApp, then click on the ‘Add Virtual Machine’ button.  The catalogue wizard should pop up, defaulting to the catalogue that you just created, and you should see your virtual machine in it.  Select the VM, then click the ‘Add’ button and then click ‘Next’:

In the next step we need to give the VM a network connection – here I’m going to connect the VM to my ‘Internal Network’ by selecting it from the network dropdown menu:

Once the network has been added, click next through to the end of the wizard, and the VM Image will begin deploying.  If I go back to my vApp diagram I can see the uploaded image is now deployed in my vApp alongside the other servers which were there previously:

That’s it!  I can now power up the machine, and my VMware Image has been moved from my local cloud onto the StratoGen VMware Hosting platform.