Welcome to 2017! To kick off the year I thought I’d do a quick post on a little known product (at least in my circles) from Red Hat Inc called ManageIQ. I stumbled across ManageIQ by chance having caught wind that they where soon to have vCloud Director support added to the product. Reading through some of the history behind ManageIQ I found out that in December of 2012 Red Hat acquired ManageIQ and integrated it into its CloudForms cloud management program…they then made it open source in 2014.

ManageIQ is the open source project behind Red Hat CloudForms. The latest product features are implemented in the upstream community first, before eventually making it downstream into Red Hat CloudForms. This process is similar for all Red Hat products. For example, Fedora is the upstream project for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and follows the same upstream-first development model.

CloudForms is a cloud management platform that also manages traditional server virtualization products such as vSphere and oVirt. This broad capability makes it ideal as a hybrid cloud manager as its able to manage both public clouds and on-premises private clouds and virtual infrastructures. This acts as a single management interface into hybrid environments that enables cross platform orchestration to be achieved with relative ease. This is backed by a community that contributes workflows and code to the project.

The supported platforms are shown below.

The October release was the first iteration for the vCloud provider which supports authentication, inventory (including vApps), provisioning, power operations and events all done via the use of the API provided by vCloud Director. First and foremost I see this as a client facing tool rather than an internal orchestration tool for vCAN SPs however given it can go cross platform there can be a use for VM or Container orchestration that SPs could tap into.

While it’s still relatively immature compared to the other platforms it supports, I see great potential in this and I think all vCAN Service Providers running vCloud Director should look at this as a way for their customers to better consume and operate vCD coming from a more modern approach, rather than depending on the UI.

Adding vCloud Director as a Cloud Provider:

Once the Appliance is deployed, head to Compute and Add New Cloud Provider. From the Type dropdown select VMware vCloud

Depending on which version of vCD SP your Service Provider is running, select the appropriate API Version. For vCD SP 8.x it should be vCloud API 9.0

Next add in the URL of the vCloud Director endpoint with it’s port…which is generally 443. For the username, you use the convention of [email protected] which allows you to login specifically to your vCD Organization. If you want to login at an admin enter in [email protected] to get top level access.

Once connected you can add as many vCD endpoints as you have. As you can see below I am connected to four seperate instances of vCloud.

Clicking through you get a Summary of the vCloud Zone with it’s relationships.

Clicking on the Instances you get a list of your VM’s, but this also has views for Virtual Datacenter, vApps and other vCD objects. As you can see below there is detailed views on the VM and it does have basic Power functions in this build.

I’ve just started to look into the power of CloudForms and have been reading through the ManageIQ automation guide. It’s one of those things that needs a little research plus some trial and error to master, but I see this form of cloud consumption where the end user doesn’t have to directly manipulate the various API endpoints as the future. I’m looking forward to how the vCloud Director provider matures and I’ll be keeping an eye on the forums and ManageIQ GitHub page for more examples.

Resources:

http://manageiq.org/docs/get-started/

http://manageiq.org/docs/reference/

https://pemcg.gitbooks.io/mastering-automation-in-cloudforms-and-manageiq/content/chapter1.html



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