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
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
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
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
Introduction While I love using the PowerCLI tools for manipulating vCloud Director, sometimes you need to perform actions that require hitting the API directly. Tools such as the RESTClient plugin for Firefox, cURL and HTTPie from the command line are good for interactive manipulation of the API, but what if … Read more
Sometimes you just need to create a new vApp with no contents at all – maybe for testing, or maybe you want to populate it with VMs built ‘from scratch’ rather than cloned from templates. This is easy to do in the vCloud Director web UI – you just skip … Read more
In part 1 of this series I posted some code for a PowerShell module to manipulate (view/add/delete) metadata tags on vCloud Director objects. As promised, in this followup post I’ve given some examples of syntax and possible use-cases for the module. The PowerShell Import-Module cmdlet can be used to add my module to … Read more
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
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
I’ve been meaning to write a public blog for a while (ok, several years) now, but there always seemed to be something more important/urgent/fun to do so I never got around to it. Having found out recently that my VMware vExpert status has been renewed for 2016 (Huge thanks guys!) … Read more