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') which had no PowervRA cmdlet. …

I had some queries on my previous blog post on using the new API Tokens in VMware Cloud Director (VCD) 10.3.1 about whether these can be used in PowerCLI scripts from PowerShell or Terraform scripts which use the VMware Terraform Provider against Cloud Director. Fortunately the answer to both questions is 'Yes' and …

One of the issues I come up against every now and again is when a customer asks how they can automate some functionality in our VMware Cloud Director (VCD) cloud platform and I think 'that should be easy in PowerShell / PowerCLI' only to find out that the necessary cmdlets to accomplish the activity aren't present. …

PowerShell can be a great way to administer Virtual Machines in VMware Cloud Director, but there are still some 'gaps' in the cmdlet cover for commonly required functions. As and when customers ask me about these I can usually find a reasonably easy way to fill the gap with some code to access the VCD API directly. …

Tom Fojta has a couple of really good blog posts on his blog (https://fojta.wordpress.com/) about using Let's Encrypt certificates on an NSX Edge Load Balancer. The first part can be found at https://fojta.wordpress.com/2016/07/16/automate-lets-encrypt-certificate-for-nsx-edge-load-balancer/ and the second part at …

One of the nicest additions to the new VMware vCloud Director 9.7 release is the ability to more fully customize the tenant portal. This now includes the capability to define custom links (together with section groupings / separators) and also the capability to customize the portal (and links) on a per-tenant basis: To …

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 Clarity framework.. The toolkit itself is …

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 so figured it would make a good/quick blog …

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 find out what …

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 be directly …