In the first part of this series of articles I described the new vCloud Director Extender (CX) software released by VMware. In this article I will show the steps required to install and configure the software from a Cloud Provider perspective. Included in this will be the necessary network and firewall configuration …

Last week VMware released version 1.0 of the new vCloud Director Extender (CX) (link to documentation set). This provides some extremely flexible options for customers to migrate servers to/from a vCloud service provider cloud platform, including the use of L2VPN to transparently stretch their on-premise networks to …

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 …

Another 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 …

I 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 …

As 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 …

This week Microsoft released Technical Preview 2 (TP2) of their ‘Cloud in a box’ Azure Stack product. This is scheduled for release in mid-2017 to allow enterprises and service providers to run Azure consistent services from their own datacenters. TP2 has a number of additional features over TP1 released earlier this …