vCNS – Think©Loud

Deploying and managing a vCNS Edge device with vCloud Director is a pretty easy task to deploy. You just spin up the appliance, integrate it with vCenter and then hook it up to vCloud Director. Piece of vCAC!

But I was trying to dig deeper into the structure of how vCNS Edge devices work and wanted to log in to the Edge device itself. The only problem I was faced with was the fact that I couldn’t log into console of the Edge appliance that was deployed by vCNS manager on my virtual infrastructure. Thankfully the vCNS Manager interface provides you with the possibility to reset the password. So to reset the password and be able to log into the vCNS edge device you have to:

1. Log into the vCNS web interface
2. Select Edges at “View:” in the left corner
3. Select the Edge Gatway you want to log into
4. Click on Actions and select “Change CLI Credentials”

This allows you to set the password for the “admin” account. With these credentials you can login to the vCNS Edge device.

“If you can create it with physical devices, you can build it in your own vCloud”. That’s something I always tell my customers when advising on VMware vCloud. Same goes for VMware vCloud Network and Security, which in my opinion hasn’t shown its full potential to customer yet. Thankfully Shubha Bheemarao and Ranga Maddipudi have created an excellent whitepaper on implementing vCloud Network and Security for a DMZ zone. This paper demonstrates how securing a virtual DMZ environment using VMware vCloud Networking and

Summary of the paper:

This paper highlights how securing a virtual DMZ environment using vCloud Networking and Security can be a strategic enabler to your organization as it helps you to reduce your capital expenditure and increase agility, while building a cloud ready, secure and scalable environment for business applications. The paper also highlights the different design approaches to securing business critical applications and enables you to make the choice that is most suited to your organization in the cloud journey. Further, it gives prescriptive configuration guidance to help you get started with the deployment of your preferred approach.

For more information on vCloud Networking and Security follow @vCloudNetSec on Twitter.

Source can be found here.