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 …

We had an issue recently when updating our vCloud Director environment to v9.1 where the new tenant portal would show ‘No Datacenters are available’ for every tenant even though the remainder of the site worked correctly (and other tabbed options like the Service Library & catalogs worked fine). Initially we …

Yesterday I wrote showing the currently available container hosting options from VMware. As we’ve recently deployed one of these options – CSE in our environment I thought it would be useful to show a sample workflow on how the service functions and how customers can use this to deploy and manage both CSE clusters, and …

VMware appears to have gone a little ‘mad’ with regards to containerisation (or containerization for any American readers) lately. Last week saw the release of Pivotal Container Service (PKS) as launched at VMworld 2017 US back in August. With this there are now a total of three VMware technologies all enabling …

In this 5th part of my look into vCloud Director Extender (CX), I deal with the extension of a customer vCenter network into a cloud provider network using the L2VPN network extension functionality. Apologies that this post has been a bit delayed, turned out that I needed a VMware support request and a code update to …

One of the things which appears to be missing from the published documentation on vCloud Director Extender (CX) is any mention of the communications internally between the deployed appliances and other VMware infrastructure components (vCenter, vCloud Director etc.) In a service provider context it is unlikely that the …

In the first 3 parts of this series I covered an overview of vCloud Director Extender (CX), the installation and configuration of CX at the Cloud Provider site and the installation and configuration of CX at the customer/tenant site. In this 4th part I will be covering the configuration of the tenant environment to …

In part 1 and part 2 of this series I detailed an overview of VMware vCloud Director Extender (CX) and the configuration from a Service Provider perspective to configure their platform to support CX. This third article in the series details the configuration steps required for a tenant/customer environment to deploy …