Tenant Portal Displays ‘No Datacenters are available’ in vCloud Director 9.1

We had an issue recently when updating our vCloud Director environment to v9.1 where the new tenant portal would show ‘No Datacenters are available’ for every tenant even though the remainder of the site worked correctly (and other tabbed options like the Service Library & catalogs worked fine). Initially we … Read more

Writing vRealize Orchestrator Workflows for vCloud Director v9.1

One of the great new features in vCloud Director 9.1 is the ability to publish Orchestrator workflows to tenants which can be consumed from within their vCloud portal. Markus Kraus has written an excellent post showing the configuration process for linking Orchestrator and vCloud Director. This post shows the process … Read more

Using vCloud Director PowerCLI and vcd-cli with Federated User Accounts

One of the issues that vCloud Director user can run into is user authentication when using the PowerCLI and vcd-cli tools to manage their cloud deployments. For ‘Local’ user accounts defined in the vCloud Director portal this isn’t an issue as username/password are stored in the vCD database and can … Read more

Using VMware Container Service Extension (CSE)

Yesterday I wrote showing the currently available container hosting options from VMware. As we’ve recently deployed one of these options – CSE in our environment I thought it would be useful to show a sample workflow on how the service functions and how customers can use this to deploy and … Read more

VMware Container Solutions

VMware appears to have gone a little ‘mad’ with regards to containerisation (or containerization for any American readers) lately. Last week saw the release of Pivotal Container Service (PKS) as launched at VMworld 2017 US back in August. With this there are now a total of three VMware technologies all … Read more

Cassandra SSL for vCloud Director metrics database

In vCloud Director v9 the requirement for both Apache Cassandra and KairosDB for storing metrics has been reduced to just Apache Cassandra. In addition, the ability to view VM metrics directly in the new  vCD 9 HTML5 tenant UI makes it much more important to have a reliable Cassandra infrastructure. … Read more

vCloud Director Extender – Part 5 – Stretch Networking (L2VPN)

In this 5th part of my look into vCloud Director Extender (CX), I deal with the extension of a customer vCenter network into a cloud provider network using the L2VPN network extension functionality. Apologies that this post has been a bit delayed, turned out that I needed a VMware support … Read more

vCloud Director Extender – Network Ports

One of the things which appears to be missing from the published documentation on vCloud Director Extender (CX) is any mention of the communications internally between the deployed appliances and other VMware infrastructure components (vCenter, vCloud Director etc.) In a service provider context it is unlikely that the appliances will … Read more

vCloud Director Extender – Part 4 – Connect to Provider & VM Migration

In the first 3 parts of this series I covered an overview of vCloud Director Extender (CX), the installation and configuration of CX at the Cloud Provider site and the installation and configuration of CX at the customer/tenant site. In this 4th part I will be covering the configuration of … Read more

vCloud Director Extender – Part 3 – Tenant Setup

In part 1 and part 2 of this series I detailed an overview of VMware vCloud Director Extender (CX) and the configuration from a Service Provider perspective to configure their platform to support CX. This third article in the series details the configuration steps required for a tenant/customer environment to … Read more