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

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

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 – 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

vCloud Director Extender – Part 2 – Cloud Provider Setup

In the first part of this series of articles I described the new vCloud Director Extender (CX) software released by VMware. In this article I will show the steps required to install and configure the software from a Cloud Provider perspective. Included in this will be the necessary network and … Read more

vCloud Director Extender – Part 1 Overview

Last week VMware released version 1.0 of the new vCloud Director Extender (CX) (link to documentation set). This provides some extremely flexible options for customers to migrate servers to/from a vCloud service provider cloud platform, including the use of L2VPN to transparently stretch their on-premise networks to the cloud provider. … Read more

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