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vCloud Director 5.1 Introduces "Open in vSphere Web Client" & Task Correlation ... Awesomeness!

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Have you ever had to troubleshoot something in vCloud Director such as looking into a particular vApp and then realizing you needed to jump over to the vSphere environment to continue troubleshooting? This meant you had to perform a separate login to your vSphere environment and most likely using a different set of credentials and then find the set of Virtual Machines that made up that vCloud Director vApp ... painful and annoying right? Wish you could just right click and jump straight to that vApp construct in vSphere?

Well, now you can with the latest release of vCloud Director 5.1 which introduces a new option called "Open in vSphere Web Client".

In the screenshot above, I have a vCloud Director vApp which contains 3 Virtual Machines and I want to jump straight to that object in the vSphere Web Client. To do so, simply right click on the object and select "Open in vSphere Web Client".

This will open up a new browser to the vSphere Web Client and locate the object in the appropriate vCenter Server and automatically log you in using the new vCenter SSO. Pretty cool huh!? This new option is not just limited to vCloud Director vApps and VMs, but applies to any vSphere object found within vCloud Director.

Note: You will need to be a System Administrator in vCloud Director to perform this operation as you will need access to the vSphere infrastructure.

Another challenge that you might have faced while troubleshooting in vCloud Director is to be able to correlate the tasks generated from vCloud Director and map those back to vSphere tasks in vCenter Server. This is not a trivial thing to do and required you to jump between vCloud Director and vCenter Server manually correlating the tasks. In vCloud Director 5.1, this has been enhanced by providing users with a single view for a given vCloud Director task and all the associated vSphere tasks that were created.

When you open a given vCloud Director task, you will be defaulted to the vCloud Director task details as you would expect. In the same view, there is also a new tab called vSphere Tasks which contains all the vCenter Server tasks generated from that given vCloud Director task.
As you can see from these two enhancements, you will be able to quickly and easily view all tasks that have taken place between vCloud Director and vCenter Server, all from a single location. If you need to drill down further into the vSphere layer, it is simply a right click and you will be taken directly to the vSphere object in the vSphere Web Client without having to provide additional credentials.

How to Enable Nested ESXi & Other Hypervisors in vCloud Director 5.1

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The process to enable  "Nested Virtualization" in the latest release of vCloud Director 5.1 and create your own virtual lab similar to VMware's vSEL (Virtual Sales Enablement Cloud) is very similar to the previous steps outlined for vCloud Director 1.5 release. The only change is how VHV (Virtual Hardware-Assisted Virtualization) aka "Nested Virtualization" is enabled in vCloud Director 5.1 and ESXi 5.1.

In the vCloud Director 1.5, to enable VHV, you needed to add a special SQL statement that would enable VHV for the underlying ESXi 5.0 hosts. With the latest release of vCloud Director 5.1, that is no longer necessary and you now enable it on a Per VM basis within the vCloud Director 5.1 UI.

Here are the steps for enabling VHV for vCloud Director 5.1

  • Insert SQL statements into VCD Database that perform the following:
    • Enable new "VMware" guestOS Family
    • Enable new guestOS Type ESXi 4.x and 5.x
    • Enable host preparation to enable VHV (vSphere 5.0 & vCloud 1.5 only)
  • Enable promiscuous mode
    • Insert SQL statement into VCD Database for Network Pool that is being used for your ESXi VMs
    • Enable both Promiscuous Mode and Forged Transmit for vSphere Backed Portgroup within vCenter Server or ESXi host

The SQL statements can be found in this article and have not changed for vCloud Director 5.1

Here is a screenshot of what you should see in the vCloud Director 5.1 UI for creating a new VM and you should now have the ability to select a new guestOS Type called "VMware" and select either an ESXi 4.x or ESXi 5.x guestOS Version.

To enable VHV for the VM, you will need to also check the box "Exposed hardware-assisted CPU virtualization to guestOS" and this will allow you to run a nested ESXi VM as well as 64-bit nested VMs, assuming your physical CPUs support it. To learn more about running VHV on ESXi 5.1, take a look at this article here for more details.