Satisfying periodic load requirements is no longer a burden

If organizations are to meet the cyclical load demands by buying hardware, it is clear that significant overhead is wasted because these devices are idle most of the year. The use of cloud services can cope with such a load peaks and to minimize overhead, such as have Amazon EC2 instance.

This article will show how virtualization administrators demonstrate how to use vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) 5.2 for basic deployment of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It should also be well-known that vCAC requires the management of all virtual machines rather than the Amazon EC2 interface.

Learn about EC2 in vCAC

First you need to go to the Enterprise Groups tab in vCAC and create a new business group. Enter your certification information after you name it. Because it is testing, I use their own domain administrator account as an enterprise administrator. At this time there is no definition of computer resources.

Then, enter the vCAC administrator interface and add Amazon resources to your vCAC environment. Click the "Endpoints" tab and use the green drop-down to the right to select a new endpoint. Click Cloud, then select Amazon EC2. Fill in the specific information. In the certification information box, select "..", there will be a screen allows you to fill in the new certification information.

Here you need to fill in Amazon EC2 access account name and password. You can get an Amazon EC2 account at http://aws.amazon.com.

Enter your login information to create a certification account. After a while, vCAC uses all the information collected to continue with the configuration. Enter a new business group and edit it. You can see multiple Amazon regions in the interface and pick the most accurate one; it should match the one you chose when creating your Amazon account. Click Ok.

You can view the data process by clicking "Log View" under the "vCAC Administrator" tab.

Now go to "Enterprise Administrator" and look at Amazon Cloud in "Computer Resources." Enter the details or select from the drop-down list box. You can also choose a security group. The default is "Allow All." (These configurations can be changed later, but beyond the scope of this article.)

Go to the "Enterprise Administrator" and select "New Blueprint" to configure the available machines for group admin approval.

Name it and add a description. In the case of a global plan, tick the "Global blueprint" checkbox. Fill in additional details, including the number of instances allowed per user. Click on the "Build information" tab and select the type of plan; usually the server type. After the configuration will follow the process automatically.

After that, select the icon by clicking the question mark next to "Amazon Machine Image." There are many icons to choose from. You can choose according to the platform you want to use, such as Windows or Linux. You can also type keywords like "Windows" to search for the platform you want to use.

After selecting Amazon instance, you need to select the most appropriate instance type. In this example, we're going to create a mini Amazon instance; Amazon offers a one-year, free mini-Amazon instance for users to test.

It should be noted that, using the configured instance, most of the machine's resources are fixed. In order to customize this access, you can click on the "Security" tab to limit user rights.

After that, you can deploy a new instance and experiment. Go to the "Enterprise Administrator" interface, click your blueprint and select "Request Machine." Fill in the information, create the message and click OK. The Amazon cloud creation process can take some time; if you need to see the creation process, you can view the workflow history and you can see the logs for Amazon EC2LaunchInstance and Amazon EC2 PowerOn.

When creation is complete, a new machine appears under "My machines" in "Self-Service". Click on instance and the "connect using Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP)" will appear in the submenu. Click "." To check the password.

Network connectivity problems and other suggestions

If there is a problem connecting to the instance, it is likely to be a firewall problem. In order to fix this problem, you need to go to the Amazon EC2 management console, access to the network and security interface. Edit the firewall policy by editing the drop-down configuration box at the bottom of the screen. During deployment, I recommend enabling the Internet Control Message Protocol to check network connectivity between your machine and EC2 instance.

Note that generating a password can take 30 minutes or more, so it takes patience to create an instance. As some information needs to be downloaded to vCAC during the creation process, it may take longer to delay.