VMware Cloud Director (VCD) has the ability to use an Apache Cassandra database to store metrics on VM performance and then make these metrics available so that tenants can view the historic performance of their VMs: Installing a Cassandra cluster for use by VCD is reasonably straightforward and requires a minimum of 4 …

In part 1 of this series I looked at the process for a Service Provider to allocate a public block of IP addresses to be consumable by VMware Cloud Director (VCD) tenant organizations. In part 2 of this series I showed the process by which a Service Provider or tenant organization can allocate IP Spaces for consumption …

In an earlier post I wrote about the new IP Spaces feature in VMware Cloud Director (VCD) release 10.4.1 and the ability to create public IP spaces shared by multiple tenants. In this post I'll look at the ability to create private IP spaces within a tenant organization and some of the considerations for how these can …

VMware recently released version 10.4.1 of VMware Cloud Director (VCD) - VMware add a new feature known as IP Spaces. IP Spaces allow providers and tenant customers to manage IP address allocations within VCD. What was originally meant to be a 'quick look' at IP Spaces and the capabilities they add has somehow turned …

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. …

VMware App Launchpad is an addon to VMware Cloud Director (VCD) which can be used by Service Providers (SPs) to allow customers/tenants to deploy pre-created templates (known as vAppTemplates) into their environments. These templates can contain any pre-loaded/configured applications (e.g. a database server or content …

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 most welcome additions in vCloud Availability (vCAV) 3.0 is a public API which exposes much of the platform capability to automation and orchestration. In particular for Service Providers it is possible to relatively easily extract statistics on the number of replicated VMs, the type of replication (ongoing …

In the 5th part in this series of posts on vCloud Availability 3.0 I wanted to try something new, so I've made a short (~10 min) video showing the configuration of VM replication between an on-premise vSphere environment and a Cloud Provider service using the vSphere client plugin and the vCloud Director tenant portal. …