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
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
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
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
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
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