Video Tutorial - Walkthrough Tour of Navisite Cloud Director for Beginners
Hello everyone and welcome! My name is Hannah Warren. I’m here today for Navisite, giving a brief demonstration of our Navisite Cloud Director (or NCD) platform, which you can access through the Proximity login portal.
Quick note about today’s tutorial: this is a general-level tutorial with our product in its current iteration. If you have specific questions or issues with your environment, please make sure you contact our Customer Service department.
For a more detailed tutorial, please visit our Knowledge Base, which is linked on the screen and also in the video description below.
And with that, we’ll get started!
This video will serve as a very basic introduction to Navisite Cloud Director and the general navigation options to get where you need to go.
When you have account credentials and log in to the Proximity portal, the first page you'll see is the Dashboard landing page. Clicking the "home" Dashboard icon on the left navigation menu will always take you back here.
The left-hand navigation menu is the main menu you'll use to move around in Navisite Cloud Director – you can have it freeze with all its sub-options revealed by clicking this icon. The left nav's first option is Assets, which pops out to reveal vDataCenters, virtual applications or vApps, virtual machines, templates, and media that exist in your environment. As a new customer, you should see four vDataCenters available where you can build out virtual infrastructure.
Navisite has four geographical locations with data centers across the world, and you can create virtual networks in each of them: Andover, Massachusetts; Santa Clara, California; and Redhill and Woking in the United Kingdom.
The geographical location of your assets can be important, depending on your location and where you anticipate the majority of your traffic coming from. vApps, or virtual applications, are containers which Navisite Cloud Director places around virtual devices as an organization tool to hold network configurations and logical groups of VMs.
They also make cloning and portability possible, and they help simplify the process of powering on or powering off a group of VMs.
Note that when you create a new network inside a vApp (which we refer to interchangeably throughout our videos as either vApp or VM networks), a gateway is also created. When you create a VM network inside a vApp, this adds another layer of firewall protection and NAT rules for VMs located on a vApp network. VMs are pretty self-explanatory. Clicking on this option brings you to a list of VMs included in your environment.
Both vApps and VMs, by the way, can be sorted by “My VMs” - VMs I personally have created, or “All VMs” which includes all of the VMs I have access to inside my organization account. Finally, we have templates and media.
Under templates, you’ll notice you can toggle between Public templates and templates which you have personally created. Public templates lists a variety available for re-hydrating into new VMs. You have a choice of numerous operating systems and versions. In Media, you’ll be able to see any ISOs you have uploaded to your environment. Next we have the views navigation option – if you click the NCD Network option, you’re taken to a diagram mapping the whole of your environment, across virtual data centers.
I personally find this really helpful to keep my thoughts organized when I’m setting up network rules, because the whole environment is laid out graphically. The illustration explicitly indicates when there’s another VM network (and therefore another gateway) that I need to consider.
You can also create custom views by clicking the "Custom" link under Views. Using this button, you can generate a table containing the details that you request. The Services navigation option takes us to NCD Services, which lists all the offerings integrated into NCD for customer use. We’ll just do a quick overview of the most commonly-used offerings here.
NCD-to-NCD Replication and Customer-to-NCD Replication both deal with Zerto – the difference there is the source location, depending on whether the content originates in another NCD environment or an on-premises storage solution.
Under the vCloud Director link, you can enable a vCloud Director web client and access the vCloud UI for each virtual data center.
Clicking Backups takes you to the Commvault portal for each virtual data center where you have backups configured. The Antivirus drop-down option allows you to configure antivirus protection through Trend Micro at each virtual data center location.
You can also find guidance on enabling Trend antivirus and Commvault backup services at our knowledge base. Finally, the Admin section of the navigation menu allows you to access your billing information, invoices, and configure alerts that notify you if your usage is approaching thresholds you set.That wraps up this video installment. Thanks for tuning in to this demonstration in NCD. As always, we’d appreciate your feedback!
If you found this video helpful or have ideas for videos in the future, we do source those from comments on our content, so don’t hesitate to share your thoughts with us. You can follow our YouTube channel for future videos, and there are 24/7 detailed demonstrations with screenshots and step-by-step “How Tos” at our knowledge base.
Thanks for tuning in. I’m Hannah Warren, and I’ll see you next time!
Quick note about today’s tutorial: this is a general-level tutorial with our product in its current iteration. If you have specific questions or issues with your environment, please make sure you contact our Customer Service department.
For a more detailed tutorial, please visit our Knowledge Base, which is linked on the screen and also in the video description below.
And with that, we’ll get started!
This video will serve as a very basic introduction to Navisite Cloud Director and the general navigation options to get where you need to go.
When you have account credentials and log in to the Proximity portal, the first page you'll see is the Dashboard landing page. Clicking the "home" Dashboard icon on the left navigation menu will always take you back here.
The left-hand navigation menu is the main menu you'll use to move around in Navisite Cloud Director – you can have it freeze with all its sub-options revealed by clicking this icon. The left nav's first option is Assets, which pops out to reveal vDataCenters, virtual applications or vApps, virtual machines, templates, and media that exist in your environment. As a new customer, you should see four vDataCenters available where you can build out virtual infrastructure.
Navisite has four geographical locations with data centers across the world, and you can create virtual networks in each of them: Andover, Massachusetts; Santa Clara, California; and Redhill and Woking in the United Kingdom.
The geographical location of your assets can be important, depending on your location and where you anticipate the majority of your traffic coming from. vApps, or virtual applications, are containers which Navisite Cloud Director places around virtual devices as an organization tool to hold network configurations and logical groups of VMs.
They also make cloning and portability possible, and they help simplify the process of powering on or powering off a group of VMs.
Note that when you create a new network inside a vApp (which we refer to interchangeably throughout our videos as either vApp or VM networks), a gateway is also created. When you create a VM network inside a vApp, this adds another layer of firewall protection and NAT rules for VMs located on a vApp network. VMs are pretty self-explanatory. Clicking on this option brings you to a list of VMs included in your environment.
Both vApps and VMs, by the way, can be sorted by “My VMs” - VMs I personally have created, or “All VMs” which includes all of the VMs I have access to inside my organization account. Finally, we have templates and media.
Under templates, you’ll notice you can toggle between Public templates and templates which you have personally created. Public templates lists a variety available for re-hydrating into new VMs. You have a choice of numerous operating systems and versions. In Media, you’ll be able to see any ISOs you have uploaded to your environment. Next we have the views navigation option – if you click the NCD Network option, you’re taken to a diagram mapping the whole of your environment, across virtual data centers.
I personally find this really helpful to keep my thoughts organized when I’m setting up network rules, because the whole environment is laid out graphically. The illustration explicitly indicates when there’s another VM network (and therefore another gateway) that I need to consider.
You can also create custom views by clicking the "Custom" link under Views. Using this button, you can generate a table containing the details that you request. The Services navigation option takes us to NCD Services, which lists all the offerings integrated into NCD for customer use. We’ll just do a quick overview of the most commonly-used offerings here.
NCD-to-NCD Replication and Customer-to-NCD Replication both deal with Zerto – the difference there is the source location, depending on whether the content originates in another NCD environment or an on-premises storage solution.
Under the vCloud Director link, you can enable a vCloud Director web client and access the vCloud UI for each virtual data center.
Clicking Backups takes you to the Commvault portal for each virtual data center where you have backups configured. The Antivirus drop-down option allows you to configure antivirus protection through Trend Micro at each virtual data center location.
You can also find guidance on enabling Trend antivirus and Commvault backup services at our knowledge base. Finally, the Admin section of the navigation menu allows you to access your billing information, invoices, and configure alerts that notify you if your usage is approaching thresholds you set.That wraps up this video installment. Thanks for tuning in to this demonstration in NCD. As always, we’d appreciate your feedback!
If you found this video helpful or have ideas for videos in the future, we do source those from comments on our content, so don’t hesitate to share your thoughts with us. You can follow our YouTube channel for future videos, and there are 24/7 detailed demonstrations with screenshots and step-by-step “How Tos” at our knowledge base.
Thanks for tuning in. I’m Hannah Warren, and I’ll see you next time!