Automated Cassandra Metrics Cluster for VCD

VMware Cloud Director (VCD) has the ability to use an Apache Cassandra database to store metrics on VM performance and then make these metrics available so that tenants can view the historic performance of their VMs: Installing a Cassandra cluster for use by VCD is reasonably straightforward and requires a … Read more

Deploying vRA Blueprints from PowerShell

The PowervRA module is a great set of PowerShell cmdlets for managing a VMware vRealize Automation (vRA) environment, but I wanted to learn a bit more about the REST API available from vRA and also had a requirement – to script a deployment from an existing vRA blueprint (‘Cloud Template’) … Read more

vCloud Director 9 HTML5 Portal Customization

One of the great features in vCloud Director 9 which has been further enhanced in the latest v9.5 release is the new HTML5 portal: Even better, VMware has released a toolkit to allow Service Providers to fully customise the look and feel of the portal using CSS themes in their … Read more

VM Guest Customization in vCloud Director via PowerCLI

Bit of a quick post this, but hopefully useful to others. I got asked recently if there was an easy way to set Guest Customization options for VMs hosted in vCloud Director via Powershell/PowerCLI. It turns out there is an extremely simple way, but the syntax is a bit awkward … Read more

Getting detailed VM Disk Properties from the vCloud API

Since vCloud Director 8.10 VMware have allowed VMs to be created which have multiple disks using different storage policies. This can be very useful – for example, a database VM might have it’s database on fast storage but another disk containing backups or logs on slower/cheaper disk. When trying to … 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