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 in multiple …
Read MoreSeveral of the posts on here and many of the internal PowerShell projects I use at work require direct interaction with the vCloud Director REST API. Usually this is because features exposed in the API aren't yet directly implemented as PowerCLI cmdlets. A good example would be the modules I wrote to allow manipulation …
Read MoreOne 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 MoreUsing Independent Disks in vCloud
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 'vm01' and …
Read MoreAnother day, another customer requirement which I figured 'this will be easy' and turned out not to be quite so easy... The customer in question is a tenant on our cloud platform and has built a VM to be their offline root Certificate Authority (CA). In line with their security practice, this VM has no network …
Read MoreI recently had a request from one of our customers who wanted an easy / scriptable method to determine the storage allocations on their hosted VMs in our vCloud platform, preferably from PowerShell. That should be easy I thought and set about my usual Google-based research. I initially found this post from Alan Renouf …
Read MoreAs 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 raised a support case to …
Read MoreLive import VMs to vCloud Director
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 import is a …
Read MoreCreate an empty vApp in vCloud Director
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 the addition of any VM templates or new VMs and can easily create …
Read MoreIn 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 …
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