Configuring VMware customizations

Use the following information to customize VMware environments for IBM® Cloud Manager with OpenStack.

Configuring VMware vCenter V6.x region
Prerequisite configuration steps before you create volumes in VMware vCenter V6.x region. In V6.x, the "x" stands for which ever VC 6 version you have.
Verifying VMware driver and DVS mechanism driver requirements
Review the following VMware and mechanism driver requirements.
Configuring the VMware DVS mechanism driver
You can configure the VMware distributed virtual switch (DVS) mechanism driver to manage VMware networks, when the VMware hypervisor is used.
Configuring Windows guest customization specification
This is a recommended way to configure the Windows guest customization specification. You can provide the attributes with metadata options.
Customizing network information for VMware Linux guests
Guest customization is intended for template images. You can provide the expected network information by using the --metadata parameter during the boot process. If you do not provide the network device attributes with metadata options, then nova-compute service gets the network device attributes from the Neutron subnet information.
Creating a virtual machine template as a snapshot image of VMware instances
A VMware virtual machine (VM) template is a master copy of a virtual machine, which is widely used by VMware to create new virtual machines. The VMware driver of IBM Cloud Manager with OpenStack allows you to create instances from a VM template and create a VM template image from a running instance.
Configuring VMware instance snapshot stored on customized datastore
From IBM Cloud Manager with OpenStack 4.3 FP8 ifix1, IBM Cloud Manager with OpenStack can support to specify datastore to store the VMware instance snapshot.
Configuring and managing live VMware snapshot
VMware live snapshot preserves the state and data of a virtual machine at a specific point in time. It includes a virtual machine’s power state and the data includes all of the files that make up the virtual machine.
Creating snapshots for an instance
Listing snapshots for a server
Deleting a snapshot for a server
Restoring a snapshot for a server
Configuring the storage backend for Glance API server
You can modify the Glance API server configuration file to specify the datastore backend that is used to store images.
VMware driver discovery service
The VMware driver discovery service discovers the following resources on vCenter and adds the discovered resources into the OpenStack database.
Configuring ephemeral disk support (VMware)
Using the IBM Cloud Manager with OpenStack command-line interface, you can add ephemeral disks during the deployment process of a virtual machine.
Configuring virtual disk resources on a live virtual machine (VMware)
You can modify CPU, memory, and virtual disk settings of a virtual machine while the virtual machine is powered on.
Connecting to a specific datastore for virtual machine deployment
When an OpenStack VMware compute node starts, you can define a set of available datastores (datastore_regex defined in nova.conf) to which the virtual machine can be deployed.
Choosing the provisioning disk type at VM deployment time for template images
By default, for instance deployment, the virtual machine disk allocation type is determined by the "vmware_disktype" image property.
Configuring the retry mechanism for VMware
When creating a virtual machine in OpenStack with the VMware driver, the retry mechanism is required, no matter how many compute hosts are in place.
Using the RetryFilter
Even though there is only one compute host in the deployment environment, the attempt might happen for the lone compute node as well.
Using random_datastore in the VMware driver
After a host is selected in the Nova scheduler, the datastore is selected within the VMware driver.

Parent topic: Configuring IBM Cloud Manager with OpenStack

Related tasks

Deploying with VMware compute nodes

Related information

Enabling Storage DRS
Enabling datastore random selection
Configuring OpenStack to support thin provisioning
Connecting to resource pools
Configuring OpenStack to support linked clones