vCloud Director v9 Multi-site

Since vCloud Director v9 was released last week (and previously as part of the closed beta), one of the new features I’m most excited about is support for multi-site deployments. This allows vCloud Director environments for the first time to properly span federated sites (e.g. a tenant who has resources … Read more

Invoke-vCloud PowerShell Module

Several of the posts on here and many of the internal PowerShell projects I use at work require direct interaction with the vCloud Director REST API. Usually this is because features exposed in the API aren’t yet directly implemented as PowerCLI cmdlets. A good example would be the modules I … Read more

vCloud Director 8.20 Edge Gateway Roles

One of the key changes in vCloud Director 8.20 and 8.20.1 from 8.10 is the Advanced Networking for Edge Gateways, this allows customer control of several advanced networking features of the Edge Gateways which previously could not be made available to tenant administrators. vCloud Director 8.20 and later also change … Read more

Using Independent Disks in vCloud

Yesterday I wrote about the PowerShell module I’ve written (CIDisk.psm1) to allow manipulation of independent disks in a vCloud environment. This post shows some usage options and details some of the caveats to be aware of when using disks in this manner. My test environment has two VMs (named imaginatively … Read more

Independent Disks in vCloud via PowerCLI

Another day, another customer requirement which I figured ‘this will be easy’ and turned out not to be quite so easy… The customer in question is a tenant on our cloud platform and has built a VM to be their offline root Certificate Authority (CA). In line with their security … Read more

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

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