VDC management. vCloud Director (NSX-T)

Create and suspend VDC

All virtual data centres (hereinafter referred to as VDCs) in vCloud Director are assigned to organisations. Thus, creating a VDC implies creating an organisation - a separate organisation is automatically created for each data centre. In this case, different services of the same customer can be assigned to the same organisation. The vCloud Director processing module (NSX-T) supports only sequential opening of services (only one VDC at a time). 

Shutting down a VDC will shut down the organisation and all virtual machines in that data centre. The status of virtual servers is not saved in BILLmanager before the VDC is shut down. When the VDC is restarted, all virtual machines will remain stopped. 

Create virtual machines

Before a new virtual machine is added, the billing platform checks the VDC resources available. If one of the resources is insufficient, a new server will not be created.

For example, a VDC has eight processors. There are two virtual servers in the data centre: one utilises two processors, the other four. In such a case, when creating a new machine, the system will not allow more than two processors to be allocated. 

A new virtual machine can be created within a new vApp (virtual machine container), or placed in an existing one.

Users can add new virtual servers to their VDC by using BILLmanager. They can do it from the service management page: Products/Services → Virtual DC → select a VDC → Virtual servers button:

• Name of the virtual machine — name of virtual machine (VM) for VDC. The field allows entering alphabet characters and numbers. 
  
• vApp template — template for creating a virtual machine container. The list includes all templates from the vCloud Director public catalogue that have enough resources in the VDC to open them. 
  Пример

  For example, a VDC has 1024 MiB of free RAM. When you create a virtual machine, the vApp template field will only contain templates that require no more than 1024 MiB of RAM. 
• Company network — organisation network to which the virtual machine will be connected. The list displays all networks available to the organisation.  If no networks are available or configured for the organisation, only the No Network Connection option is available. For more information on how to configure networks, see the article Network management. vCloud Director (NSX-T)
• Hard drive capacity — the size of the virtual server's hard disc. If you change the size of the disc space set for the default template, you need to change the disc partition inside the OS. If backup is configured for this hard disc, the cost of the service will be automatically adjusted if its volume is increased.
• Number of CPU — number of virtual processors.
• RAM, MiB — the amount of RAM available for the virtual server.
• Password — password to access the virtual server.

Synchronise the list of virtual machines

Every 30 minutes, an automatic synchronisation of the list of virtual machines, networks and routers starts:

• If there are differences in virtual machine parameters, they are adjusted to the values specified in BILLmanager;
• If a virtual machine was deleted via vCloud Director, this machine will also be deleted in BILLmanager;
• if the virtual machine was added via vCloud Director, the server information will be passed to BILLmanager. 

To start synchronisation manually, go to Products/Services → Virtual DC → select data centre → Virtual servers buttons → Update. 

Search for available IP addresses

Additional IPs for your VDC are searched per the following algorithm:

1. The system looks for networks with applicable names. The name shall start from the value shown in the field "Network prefix".
2. The number of available IP addresses is calculated for each network.
3. The system assigns the first available IP from the network to the VDC.

If no free addresses are found, the platform will restart the search operation 10 times. If no addresses are found during the restarts, the operation will end with an error and a task will be created to the responsible department.