Dynamic Persistent Volumes with CSE Kubernetes and Ceph

Introduction Application containerization with Docker is fast becoming the default deployment pattern for many business applications and Kubernetes (k8s) the method of managing these workloads. While containers generally should be stateless and ephemeral (able to be deployed, scaled and deleted at will) almost all business applications require data persistence of … Read more

Installing and Using the vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) CLI

Something I was not aware of until recently was that vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) has it’s own Command Line Interface (CLI) environment. This can be an invaluable tool when developing new vRO workflows and actions as it allows you to easily test expressions and code snippets in your environment. Once developed … 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

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