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[music]
Hi, I'm Matthew Ford, R&D Manager at VMware. In this video, I will talk about creating
a blueprint for a three-tier application using vFabric Application Director.
vFabric Application Director is an application provisioning solution. It automates the deployments
of multitier applications in hybrid cloud environments. With vFabric Application Director,
you can model applications once and deploy them in multiple public or private clouds.
They can range from simple Web applications to complex custom applications. You can standardize
and scale blueprints and deploy them in different deployment environments.
The pre-built library of standardized and reusable sample applications facilitates the
customization of an application model. vFabric Application Director assigns users,
infrastructure and application related roles for their functions.
For an application to be deployed to a hybrid cloud environment, the cloud administrator
must register the cloud provider and map the logical templates to a vCloud Director physical
template.
An application architect then models a blueprint. The deployer takes this standard blueprint
and deploys it to one or more cloud environments.
Application architects use the intuitive drag-and-drop interface to create application deployment
topologies called application blueprints. These blueprints define the application structure,
enable the use of standardized application components, allow the creation of installation
dependencies, and provide default configurations for custom applications.
To create an application consisting of a Web node, application node, and database node
with corresponding operating systems, you must have vCloud Director 1.5 installed and
configured correctly.
Login to the vFabric Application Director Web interface as an application architect
user and select, Manage Applications. You can customize and deploy the predefined
sample applications in your test environment from the Applications list.
For example, there are sample applications for booking a hotel, deploying an application
on Ruby on Rails, or running the Zimbra email and collaboration suite. To create and model
an application, click the Add button. Name the application, specify the version, and
include a description.
In the blueprint canvas, use the existing logical templates containing virtual machines
and operating system configurations, application components such as WAR or JAR files, and services
such as MySQL or Apache.
Drag two CentOS 32-bit logical templates and one template with preinstalled MySQL onto
the blueprint canvas. Change the name of the nodes. For each node,
you can configure the virtual machine resources, such as number of vCPUs and memory allocation
from the Details tab.
Convert the application node to a cluster and change the cluster size to three virtual
machines.
With the logical templates in place, drag an Apache server to the Web node to load balance
the application. Add a tc Server to the application node and set the name.
Add a WAR file to the application node, set the name, and add the installer location,
install path, and start command. Drag the SQL SCRIPT component to the preinstalled MySQL
server on the database node.
From the Actions tab of the SQL SCRIPT component, add the install script to the blueprint so
that vFabric Application Director can automatically initialize the database. You can reuse the
install scripts from the existing sample applications. As a best practice, you should periodically
save the blueprint.
vFabric Application Director lets you bind properties to each other to customize a script.
The property value is inherited from another component or virtual machine properties such
as IP addresses.
Set the Apache service property, http node IPs, to get an array of IP address of the
clustered application nodes. With services and application components configured,
create dependencies between the Apache, SampleApp, and SQL services.
During deployment, the Apache server waits for the tasks in the application and database
server nodes to complete successfully before the installation task begins on the Web server
node. Review and save the blueprint.
You can now frequently deploy this blueprint to the entire life cycle starting from development
through testing and production. For more information on application modeling,
visit pubs.vmware.com.