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 …

I previously wrote here and here about using the new VMware Cloud Director (VCD) API tokens functionality first introduced in version 10.3.1 to allow scripts and automation to connect to a VCD environment. With the update to VMware PowerCLI version 13.1 the previous way of achieving this is deprecated as the …

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 …

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. …

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 …

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 …