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. …

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. …

In the first 3 parts of this series I detailed the configuration and deployment of vCAv 3.0 into a service provider site. In this 4th part I show the deployment and configuration of vCAv into a tenant on-premise infrastructure. This allows appropriately configured tenants to protect on-premise VMs to a cloud provider …

The first 2 parts of this series covered the overall vCloud Availability (vCAv) architecture and the deployment and configuration of the vCAv appliances into a Cloud Provider site. Before continuing pairing sites and configuring VM replication policies, first check that all services are online and showing as healthy. …

Deployment Configuration In my lab environment I have two SP datacenter locations (Auckland and Christchurch since I'm in New Zealand) and a complete vCloud infrastructure running in each location. I have defined the appliance names and IP addresses prior to deploying vCAv and registered these in DNS prior to starting …

VMware has recently released version 3.0 of vCloud Availability (vCAv) (Release Notes) which allows vCloud Service Providers to offer a variety of VM protection and migration services to their tenant customers. vCAv 3.0 combines features previously available in 3 separate VMware products (vCloud Availability …

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 …

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 these …

Firstly I’ll start this off by saying that I don’t usually write opinion pieces – I’d much rather share some cool technology or tips that I’ve come across in my day job (or even playing with technology in my own time). Secondly, my perspective is likely a bit skewed – I work in one of the most virtualized and …