Detailed VM Storage Information in vCloud Director

I recently had a request from one of our customers who wanted an easy / scriptable method to determine the storage allocations on their hosted VMs in our vCloud platform, preferably from PowerShell. That should be easy I thought and set about my usual Google-based research. I initially found this … Read more

Uploading / running utilities directly on ESXi hosts

As part of planning our upgrade from VMware NSX-V from v6.2.2 to v6.2.4 we became aware of the VMware issue KB2146171 (link) which can cause VMs to lose network connectivity when vMotioned to other hosts following the upgrade. Obviously wishing to avoid this for our own (and customer) VMs, we … Read more

Installing Microsoft Azure Stack TP2 on VMware ESXi

This week Microsoft released Technical Preview 2 (TP2) of their ‘Cloud in a box’ Azure Stack product. This is scheduled for release in mid-2017 to allow enterprises and service providers to run Azure consistent services from their own datacenters. TP2 has a number of additional features over TP1 released earlier … Read more

Live import VMs to vCloud Director

Tom Fojta wrote a great blog post about the new capability in vCloud Director 8.10 to import running VMs into vCloud Director. This is a huge asset in migration scenarios where customers can’t afford outages when being migrated into the vCD environment. Unfortunately the API syntax to actually initiate the … Read more

Client Integration Plugin madness

One of the frustrations dealing with the vSphere Web Client has always been the requirement for a browser plugin to import/export OVF templates. In vSphere 6 and vCloud Director 8 this has reached a whole new level of frustration. The issue is that both vSphere 6 and vCloud Director 8 … Read more

Working with vCloud Metadata in PowerCLI – Part 1

Way back in 2012 Alan Renouf created a PowerCLI module to deal with manipulation of metadata entries for vCloud Director objects – this can be incredibly useful to track related information for these objects. The vCD metadata functionality was enhanced in v5.1 (and then later in 5.5, 5.6 and 8.0) – in particular … Read more