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. …

One of the great new features in vCloud Director 9.1 is the ability to publish Orchestrator workflows to tenants which can be consumed from within their vCloud portal. Markus Kraus has written an excellent post showing the configuration process for linking Orchestrator and vCloud Director. This post shows the process …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …