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 …

Tom Fojta wrote a great blog post about the new capability in vCloud Director 8.10 to import running VMs into vCloud Director. This is a huge asset in migration scenarios where customers can't afford outages when being migrated into the vCD environment. Unfortunately the API syntax to actually initiate the import is a …

Introduction While I love using the PowerCLI tools for manipulating vCloud Director, sometimes you need to perform actions that require hitting the API directly. Tools such as the RESTClient plugin for Firefox, cURL and HTTPie from the command line are good for interactive manipulation of the API, but what if you want …

Sometimes you just need to create a new vApp with no contents at all - maybe for testing, or maybe you want to populate it with VMs built 'from scratch' rather than cloned from templates. This is easy to do in the vCloud Director web UI - you just skip the addition of any VM templates or new VMs and can easily create …

Way back in 2012 Alan Renouf created a PowerCLI module to deal with manipulation of metadata entries for vCloud Director objects - this can be incredibly useful to track related information for these objects. The vCD metadata functionality was enhanced in v5.1 (and then later in 5.5, 5.6 and 8.0) - in particular typed …