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 feature requests which I've wanted for a long time is the ability to generate user API tokens in Cloud Director. Since most service providers enforce MFA/2FA authentication to the Cloud Director UI (which is a very good thing and something I definitely recommend) this can make it more difficult for …

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 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 …

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 …

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 …

Several 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 …

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 …

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 …