Tag:

upgrade

VMware Cloud FoundationVMware vCenter

How To Apply Async Patch to VMware Cloud Foundation 5.1+

by Tommy Grot
written by Tommy Grot 3 minutes read

The VMware SDDC Manager async patch tool allows you to upgrade individual products outside of the standard VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) baseline. This tool can be used to upgrade products such as vCenter, NSX, and ESXi to newer versions without affecting the overall VCF deployment.

To use the async patch tool, you will need to download the patch or upgrade package for the specific product you want to update. You can then upload the package to the SDDC Manager and initiate the upgrade process. The async patch tool will automatically handle the upgrade process for the individual product, ensuring that it is seamlessly integrated into your VCF environment.

Overall, the async patch tool provides a convenient way to keep your VMware products up to date without disrupting your VCF deployment.

VMware Docs for Async Patch Tool

Async Patch Tool Walkthrough

Lets begin! – Open WinSCP or/ SCP upload the vcf-async-patch-tool-1.1.0.2.tar.gz,

Then, take a snapshot of your vCenter and as well SDDC Manager for safety!

Once snapshots are done and verified then, SSH into your SDDC Manager with vcf user, but ensure to enable the SSH Time out. ( Example Below)

  • 300 Second is five minutes
  • Putty -> Change Settings -> Connection -> Seconds between keepalives (0 to turn off) > set to 300 > Apply

Then we will need to make the directory for async patch tool

mkdir /home/vcf/asyncPatchTool

Copy the vcf-async-patch-tool-1.1.0.2.tar.gz, (or latest version) into /home/vcf/asyncPatchTool

tar -xvf vcf-async-patch-tool-1.1.0.2.tar.gz
Set the permissions for the asyncPatchTool directory
cd /home/vcf/
chmod -R 755 asyncPatchTool
chown -R vcf:vcf asyncPatchTool

Next, you will execute the command below to enable async to pull patches.

./vcf-async-patch-tool --listAsyncPatch --du < Your E-Mail for Customer Connect >

Next the Patch Tool will ask you if your running the latest version ( Y ) or ( N ) and CEIP as well.

  • Enter Y to confirm that you are running the latest version of the Async Patch Tool.
  • Read the information and enter Y to acknowledge the pre-requisites.
  • Enter Y or N to choose whether or not to participate in the VMware Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP).
  • Enter the password for the super user (vcf) account.
  • Enter the password for the root user account.
  • Enter the password for the management domain SSO user account.
  • Enter your VMware Customer Connect (Depot) password.

So, for my patch I select the latest vCenter Server 8U2b and I repeated the same setups for gaining my ESXi Patch as well.

./vcf-async-patch-tool -e --patch VCENTER:8.0.2.00200-23319993 --du <E Mail Customer Connect> --sddcSSOUser <SSOuser> --sddcSSHUser vcf --it ONLINE

Status of Async Progress shown in these snips

Now you will see Bundles showing up within Bundle Management!

Snippet Below Shows Running Async patch tool

After the bundles have been uploaded, we may go back to SDDC UI and go to the specific workload domain, for my environment it is the Management Workload domain. Upgrade progress snippet below of vCenter Server

Once all patches are completed, SSH back into VCF SDDC Manager and execute the following command to disable patches.

  • Navigate to /home/vcf/asyncPatchTool/bin.
  • Run the following command:
./vcf-async-patch-tool --disableAllPatches --sddcSSOUser SSOuser --sddcSSHUser vcf
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VMware ESXiVMware vCenter

Upgrading to VMware vSphere 8 Update 1

by Tommy Grot
written by Tommy Grot 4 minutes read

Tonight’s topic is upgrading to the new and most anticipated update of: vSphere 8 Update 1 from vSphere 8.0. In this walk through we will do a step by step process of what you will need to do before you upgrade your vSphere environment.

What’s New

Some tidbits of information below from the Release Notes – More Information check out the release notes here

  • vSphere 8.0 IA/GA Release Model: For more information on the Release Model of vSphere Update releases, see The vSphere 8 Release Model Evolves.
  • vSphere Configuration Profiles: vSphere 8.0 Update 1 officially launches vSphere Configuration Profiles, which allow you to manage ESXi cluster configurations by specifying a desired host configuration at the cluster level, automate the scanning of ESXi hosts for compliance to the specified Desired Configuration and remediate any host that is not compliant. vSphere Configuration Profiles require that you use vSphere Lifecycle Manager images to manage your cluster lifecycle, a vSphere 8.0 Update 1 environment, and Enterprise Plus or vSphere+ license. For more information, see Using vSphere Configuration Profiles to Manage Host Configuration at a Cluster Level.
  • With vSphere 8.0 Update 1, vSphere Distributed Services Engine adds support for:
    • NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPUs to server designs from Lenovo (Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 V2).
    • 100G NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPUs to server designs from Dell.
    • UPTv2 for NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPUs.
    • AMD Genoa CPU based server designs from Dell.
  • Support for heterogenous virtual graphics processing unit (vGPU) profiles on the same GPU hardware: vSphere 8.0 Update 1 removes the requirement that all vGPUs on a physical GPU must be of the same type and you can set different vGPU profiles, such as compute, graphics, or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure workload, on one GPU to save cost by higher GPU utilization and reduced workload fragmentation.
  • Integration of VMware Skylineâ„¢ Health Diagnosticsâ„¢ with vCenter: Starting with vSphere 8.0 Update 1, you can detect and remediate issues in your vSphere environment by using the VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics self-service diagnostics platform, which is integrated with the vSphere Client. For more information, see VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics for vSphere Documentation.
  • VM-level power consumption metrics: Starting with vSphere 8.0 Update 1, you as a vSphere admin can track power consumption at a VM level to support the environmental, social, and governance goals of your organization.

What you need:

First thing you want to get your vCenter Server Appliance on the newest version, before you upgrade your VMware ESXi hosts to 8.0.1.

Below we will walk through the process to get your VCSA backed up before upgrading!

(Side Note – Make sure you have SFTP or any other means of backing up your VCSA, for this walk through we will not go through setting up a SFTP server)

Once the VCSA is backed up successfully – > Then click Stage and Install

Accept that lovely EULA 🙂 If you don’t then no upgrade for you.

Click Next – it will be running pre-checks, and the upgrade process will start, the whole process took roughly less than 15 minutes, this depends on your environment and how large the db and how many objects maintained within VCSA.

Install in progress….

During this process it will convert your data from the previous installation over to your new one, so if there is lots of metrics and logs and historical information it may take a bit.

I went and took a look at how the vSphere Client status is, and there is a new UI addon where it is different from previous deployments of vSphere 8.0

Lets log back into your vCenter!

We will prep the cluster image and since I have Dell PowerEdge R740s (14th Gen) hardware I make sure I have the correct Vendor addon selected and validated.

After few minutes of validating, your Image for your cluster will be ready to be applied

Lets start remediating some servers, one by one. As I have Dell PowerEdge R740s, I have quick boot enabled so the whole upgrade process for each ESXi host was less than 10 minutes for each host.

Upgrade In Process…

While we are waiting, I like to login to the servers iDRAC and watch the upgrade process.

Few minutes later we are on VMware ESXi 8.0.1

After all ESXi hosts are upgrade to 8.0.1, next we will go to Configure -> vSAN – > Disk Management -> Upgrade Disks format version to version 18.0 from 17.0

Some neat additions to vSphere 8 Update 1 – I do like how there are tiles now with more detailed information, but also you can toggle the hamburger menu to collapse all these tiles into a easier to see all Health Findings.

Also, I am glad that the usage is back into its tile on the vSphere User Interface, it is a much needed and appreciated addon back into vSphere 8.0.1

That is all! After following through the walkthrough you should of been able to upgrade your vSphere 8 to vSphere 8.0.1.

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Cloud

Upgrading VMware Cloud Director to 10.x Versions

by Tommy Grot
written by Tommy Grot 4 minutes read

This walkthrough is valid for VMware Cloud Director 10.6.x Upgrade!

What’s New

VMware Cloud Director version 10.4.1.1 release provides bug fixes, updates the VMware Cloud Director appliance base OS and the VMware Cloud Director open-source components.

Resolved Issues

  • VMware Cloud Director operations, such as powering a VM on and off takes longer time to complete after upgrading to VMware Cloud Director 10.4.1After upgrading to VMware Cloud Director 10.4.1, VMware Cloud Director operations, such as powering a VM on or off takes longer time to complete. The task displays a Starting virtual machine status and nothing happens.The jms-expired-messages.logs log file displays an error.RELIABLE:LargeServerMessage & expiration=
  • During an upgrade from VMware Cloud Director 10.4 to version 10.4.1, upgrading the standby cell fails with a Failure: Error while running post-install scripts error messageWhen upgrading the VMware Cloud Director appliance by using an update package from version 10.4 to version 10.4.1, the upgrade of the standby cell fails with an error message.Failure: Error while running post-install scriptsThe update-postgres-db.log log file displays an error.> INFO: connecting to source node> DETAIL: connection string is: host=primary node ip user=repmgr> ERROR: connection to database failed> DETAIL:> connection to server at “primary node ip”, port 5432 failed: could not initiate GSSAPI security context: Unspecified GSS failure. Minor >> code may provide more information: No Kerberos credentials available (default cache: FILE:/tmp/krb5cc_1002)> connection to server at “primary node ip”, port 5432 failed: timeout expired
More Fixes and Known Issues here

More Information about VMware Cloud Director 10.4.1

VMware Cloud Director 10.4.1 introduces several new concepts that facilitate creating, deploying, running, and managing extensions. Solution Add-Ons are an evolution of VMware Cloud Director extensions that are built, implemented, packaged, deployed, instantiated, and managed following a new extensibility framework. Solution Add-Ons contain custom functionality or services and can be built and packaged by a cloud provider or by an independent software vendor. VMware also develops and publishes its own VMware Cloud Director Solution Add-Ons.

My Versions

  • VMware NSX 4.1.0.0.0.21332672
  • VMware vCSA 8.0.0 21216066
  • VMware Cloud Director 10.4.1

First. properly shutdown your VCD Cells if you have multiple cells. Once they are turned off take a snapshot of all of the appliances

Next we will want to upload the tar.gz file via WINSCP to the primary VCD Cell if you have a multi cell deployment you will need to upgrade the first cell, then second and third.

I have logged into the VCD appliance with root account

Then open up a Putty session to the VCD appliance login as root,

Then change directory to /tmp/ Once in the directory:

cd /tmp

Create a Directory within /tmp directory, with the command below:

mkdir local-update-package

Start to upload the VMware_Cloud_Director_10.4.1.9360-21373231_update.tar.gz file for the upgrade into /tmp/local-update-package via winscp

File has been successfully uploaded to the VCD appliance.

Next steps we will need to prepare the appliance for the upgrade:

We will need to move the VMware_Cloud_Director_10.4.1.9360-21373231_update.tar.gz from the /tmp directory to /tmp/local-update-package/

mv VMware_Cloud_Director_10.4.1.9360-21373231_update.tar.gz /tmp/local-update-package

Once in the local-update-package director, and you have your VMware_Cloud_Director_10.4.1.9360-21373231_update.tar.gz run the command below to extract the update package in the new directory we created in /tmp/local-update-package

tar -zxf VMware_Cloud_Director_10.4.1.9360-21373231_update.tar.gz

You can run the “ls” command and you shall see the VMware_Cloud_Director_10.4.1.9360-21373231_update.tar.gz file along with manifest and package-pool

After you have verified the local update directory then we will need to set the update repository.

vamicli update --repo file:///tmp/local-update-package

Check for update with this command after you have set the update package into the repository address

vamicli update --check

Now, we see that we have a upgrade that is staged and almost ready to be ran! But, we will need to shutdown the cell(s) with this command

/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/cell-management-tool -u administrator cell --shutdown

Next is to take a backup of the database, log into VMware Cloud Director Appliance, https://<your-ip>:5480 , same port as vCSA VAMI.

Backup was successful! Now, time for the install

Apply the upgrade for VCD, the command below will run will install the update

vamicli update --install latest

Now, the next step is important, if you have any more VCD Cell appliances you will want to repeat first few steps and then just run the command below to upgrade the other appliances:

/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/upgrade

Select Y to Proceed with the upgrade

After successful upgrade, you may reboot VCD appliance and test, and after successful tests remove your snapshot.

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VMware vCenter

Upgrading vSphere 7.0.3 to vSphere 8.0

by Tommy Grot
written by Tommy Grot 6 minutes read

vSphere 8 Update 1 – Released!! If you want to see how to upgrade go here to new blog post!

I will be going over on how to upgrade your vSphere 7 to vSphere 8! I will be doing step by step screenshots to walk anyone through, keep in mind that this is upgrading from vSphere 7.0.3 going to vSphere 8.0.

Exciting news! vSphere 8 is (IA) Yes, there is a new release model. Below I have some information below from VMware’s website but if you want to get more in-depth information go to the link below!

New IA/GA model (Information from VMware)

Our intent going forward is that all major and update vSphere releases will be delivered first with an IA designation. An IA release is a production-quality release that meets all GA quality gates and is fully partner certified. IA releases will be available during the IA phase to all customers for production deployments.

Changing to this IA/GA model is motivated by several factors. Most importantly, feedback from customers who want us to be more explicit when a release has achieved strong traction and usage without having to wait for the next update release, which they sometimes use as a proxy. By switching the designation from IA to GA, we’ll be making it clear when the release has gained wide adoption. We think this is a better model than waiting for a 6-month update, particularly as these updates now include feature enhancements as well as net new features.

DISCLAIMER:

– Everything I document here is on my lab, do not try this on a production system if you do not have backups or a way to restore if something goes wrong.

– This Walkthrough is only for a vSphere Cluster upgrade

Before you start the upgrde ensure you have a backup of your vCenter Server Appliance.

We will be upgrading a vSphere 7.0.3 Cluster to vSphere 8.0! Below is the vSphere 7 snippet

Download you ISO from VMware’s website and copy the iso to your local workstation

Once you get your ISO ready mount it to your local computer and drill down into the

vcsa-ui-installer -> win32 -> then execute installer.exe

Go to Upgrade ->

Once you are ready to upgrade your environment you will go Next

Once you get to this window, you will want to fill in your Source Appliance which is the vSphere 7 Cluster you want to upgrade. For Example: lab-vcsa-m01.virtualbytes.io

Then -> Click Connect to Source

Once it connects to the source server, you will get this detail specific page during the deployment asking to fill in the vCenter Server Appliance SSO Username and Password along with the Appliance (OS) root password along with the ESXi Host or vCenter Server that manages the source appliance

Accept the Certificate Warning which you will have your Source and Destination servers where the appliance will get deployed

Input your vCenter Server deployment target, where the new vCenter Server Appliance will get deployed

If you are installing this select your current datacenter object where the vCSA appliance will be stored in

This is creating the new vCSA on the target server, you will want to make sure that the two vCenter Server Appliances do not collide with the same naming convention or you will get any error saying this name for the VM exists.

Fill in your network information for the upgraded preparation

After ~15 minutes, you will get to the Phase 2 of the Upgrade Process, Click -> Next

I purposly did not enable SSH on my source vCenter Server, this way if anyone encounters the same issue, this will guide you to make sure you have SSH enabled on the Source vCenter Server Applaince or you will get this error below 🙂

After you enabled SSH and re-try the task you will go into the Pre-Upgrade Checks state

Below is a Pre-Upgrade check result which has some Warnings to let you know

Here at this step we are about to upgrade the data for our vCSA! Select your requirment, i only did the Configuration and Inventory.

Select – > I have backed up the source vCenter Server and all the required data from the database.

WARNING!! – Make sure you have your source vCenter backed up and/or snapshot to revert too if something does not upgrade properly.

This process will take ~ 15 – 20 minutes max, but this also depends on how large your environment is, the more objects in the data base the longer it will take.

Next snippet, will show you that we have copied the data from the source vCenter Server to the Targer vCenter Server

Now, that we have finalized the migration and the import to the target vCenter Server is done, we will log into the new vCSA appliance.

Login with your ” [email protected]”

Now, you shall see that our vCenter Server is at vSphere 8. Next we will be creating a Baseline within vSphere Life Cycle Manager to upgrade our Hosts.

Click on the top right hamburger menu -> Life Cycle Manager

Go to Imported ISOs ->

Now we will upload our vSphere 8 ISO – > VMware-VMvisor-Installer-8.0-20513097.x86_64.iso

Once it is uploaded, we will go and create a Baseline for our new Image to upgrade the ESXi hosts from ESXi 7 to 8

Then go “Baselines” -> New -> Baseline

Now we will create a name for our baseline -> vSphere 8 Upgrade

Attach the vSphere 8.0 iso we just uploaded earlier to this baseline.

Finalize the Creation of the vSphere 8 Upgrade baseline

Then go back to the ESXi host object, and go to Updates tab

Here we will attach the vSphere 8 Upgrade Baseline we created

Once the ESXi host has the new vSphere 8 baseline attached, you can now Remediate the host, and then repeat the vLCM (vSphere Life Cycle Manager) Baseline attach to the rest of your hosts and then follow the traditional Remediation process that way your ESXi hosts properly migrate workloads off to other ESXi hosts during this process to ensure that you won’t have any downtime.

Web console view of our ESXi host that just got upgraded!!

Our first ESXi host has been upgraded to vSphere 8!

Next, after all our ESXi hosts are on vSphere 8, we will want to make sure that our vSAN version is upgraded so you will want to upgrade it.

Go to your vSAN Cluster -> Configure -> Services

Once you get to vSAN Services, you will see Pre-Check vSAN upgrade and Upgrade vSAN. A proper best practice is to do a pre-check of your vSAN cluster to ensure that all the objects are healthy and synchronized and there are not disk issues before doing a vSAN upgrade.

After vSAN upgrade – Your vSphere Cluster is now officially upgraded to vSphere 8! with vSAN 8! This walkthrough was able to walk you through any issues that you may encounter. Next blog post will be on how to convert a vSAN (OSA) Datastore to vSAN (ESA) – Express Storage Architecture

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Cloud

VMware Cloud Director – Customization & Branding w/ API

by Tommy Grot
written by Tommy Grot 3 minutes read

A in depth post on how to customize your VMware Cloud Director! If your organization has a specific theme and logo, well tonight’s post will guide you through the steps to get it all configured and looking all spiffy!

By default, installation Cloud Director offers two types of themes, the default white mode and dark mode. You can manage, create, and add your own themes to VCD. The steps we will be following through will be done system level so all Tenants and the Provider will see the updated VCD UI!

First connect to VCD Cell appliance via SSH –

Change Directory to

cd /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin

Run the Cell Management Tool

./cell-management-tool manage-config -n backend.branding.requireAuthForBranding -v false

Next we will utilize Postman to do the next few tasks

Access Token Authentications

You will want to get your Access Token and API Version, below I will explain on how to do that to get your API version

Get -> https://<Your-IP-Here>/api/versions

Authorization Tab

  • Basic Auth – Username: “administrator@system” & Password: <your password>

Headers Tab

  • Key: Accept Value: application/*;version=37.0

Below is the supported version I utilized, I did not used the beta version.

</VersionInfo>
<VersionInfo deprecated="false">
    <Version>37.0</Version>
    <LoginUrl>https://172.16.204.120/cloudapi/1.0.0/sessions</LoginUrl>
    <ProviderLoginUrl>https://172.16.204.120/cloudapi/1.0.0/sessions/provider</ProviderLoginUrl>
</VersionInfo>

POST API Sessions

Now we will create a POST within Postman.

POST https://172.16.204.120/api/sessions

Authorization Tab

  • Basic Auth – Username: “administrator@system” & Password: <your password>

NOTE -> Once you execute the POST, make sure you get a 200 OK status before proceeding futher.

Next you will want to save the token above as sampled in the image, you will need it for the Beare Token.

Headers

  • KEY: x-vcloud-authorization VALUE: e31a8bd0d1244282bed8b4b809ba9e1f
  • KEY: X-VMWARE-VCLOUD-ACCESS-TOKEN VALUE: <eyJ….>

Cloud Director Web Portal Customization

For this next section you will need to execute GET calls to get the current portal configuration with the above Bearer Token KEYS and VALUES

GET https://172.16.204.120/cloudapi/branding

Once you execute the call you will want to go to the Body section and you will see something like this, but a fresh installation of VCD – Portal Name will be ” VMware Cloud Director” and the theme name would be “Default” Which mine is set to Dark mode.

Sample Body Configuration

{
    "portalName": "Virtual Bytes Cloud",
    "portalColor": null,
    "selectedTheme": {
        "themeType": "BUILT_IN",
        "name": "Dark"
    },
    "customLinks": [
        {
            "name": "help",
            "menuItemType": "override",
            "url": null
        },
        {
            "name": "imprint",
            "menuItemType": "override",
            "url": null
        },
        {
            "name": "about",
            "menuItemType": "override",
            "url": null
        },
        {
            "name": "vmrc",
            "menuItemType": "override",
            "url": null
        }
    ]
}

    Then once you get your custom configuration ready you will want to do a PUT Call via Postman

Once you POST your Branding configuration, go back to Web UI of VCD and hit refresh! You should see something like below 🙂

Cloud Director Web Portal Logo Customization

Now. for our logo we will do another API call via Postman to PUT a png file for the system level logo.

Authorization Tab

  • Bearer Token from previous API call we did

Headers

  • KEY: Accept VALUE: application/*;version=37.0
  • KEY: x-vcloud-authorization VALUE: “e31a8bd0d1244282bed8b4b809ba9e1f” <- Put your value for the call not mine 🙂
  • KEY: X-VMWARE-VCLOUD-ACCESS-TOKEN VALUE: “eyJhbGciOiJSUzI…..” <- I shorted the Bearer Token

Go to Body – Change it to binary and find your logo.png file to upload and then hit Send.

Top right corner you will see the logo I uploaded to Cloud Director!

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EducationNetworking

VMware NSX Ninja Program

by Tommy Grot
written by Tommy Grot 1 minutes read

So where to begin? My goal I have is to become a VCIX within DCV and NV, but it will come soon! I have been passionate about learning and progressing my skill sets within VMware Solutions and creating complex environments, but with coming along with few folks at VMware which invited me into VMware NSX Ninja Program for NSX-T and VCF Architecture. As this Program is geared toward the Intermediate / Expert level it does challenge you but I have managed to succeed! I have finished Week 1 of 3, the VMware Certified Instructors are amazing they teach and walk-through real-world solutions which let you get a good understanding of the many bells and whistles that NSX-T and VCF can offer! As i go through the journey of the NSX Ninja, I will be adding more great content to this post! Stay Tuned 🙂

NSX Ninja Week 1 – Overview

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Cloud

VMware Cloud Director 10.3.3: Creating a Tenant

by Tommy Grot
written by Tommy Grot 3 minutes read

A little about what VMware Cloud Director is – it is a CMP or also known as a cloud managment plane which supports, pools and abstracts the VMware virtualization infrastructure as (VDC) Virtual Data Centers. A provider can offer many different flavors and specifcations of a Tenant to a customer, it could be a Gold, Silver or Bronze types of capacity and tiering which allows a good allocation model depending on a customer that needs a higher guarenteed resource usage or allocation where as a lower tier customer wants to test few software solutions they could use a bronze tier and be able to save costs.

Once you are logged in, then you will want to create few things first! But my previous blog post already explains on how to add a vCenter Server and NSX-T integration here at this post.

Well lets begin! First we will want to create a Network pool which is a VXLAN that will reside within the tenant environment will run ontop of Geneve on the overlay!

  • Login into the Provider portal of VCD with the administrator account
  • https://<vcd-ip>/provider/

Go to Network Pools

The network will be Geneve backed to ride the NSX-T overlay

Select the NSX-T Manager

The network pool which is backed by NSX-T Transport Zone we will want to select the transport zone that you have created for your edge nodes during the NSX-T setup.

Once you have your Network Pool setup and followed the steps you should see something like this!

Network Pool has been successfully created as shown below

After a network pool has been created, next we will create the Provider VDC ( Virtual Data Center)

Select the Provider vCenter you have configured within the Infrastructure portion

Select the Cluster, for me – I have a vSAN Cluster

Once you select the vSAN or Cluster you have in your envirnonemnt, you may proceed but the Hardware Version should be left as default since this is the maximum hardware version VCD can run and accept.

Select vSAN Storage Policy if you have vSAN if not then select the proper storage policy your storage platform is using
The network pool we created earlier, this is where we get to consume it and we let NSX-T manager and Geneve network pool run out VCD environment
  • Next, we will create an organization for us to be able to attach a VDC to
    it, which for this walk through my org is Lab-01. That will be the same name
    you use when you login as a tenant into VCD.
  • An organization is just a logical group of resources that are presented to customers, where each organization has its own isolation/security boundaries and their own Web UI which they can use an identity manager to integrate such as LDAP for seamless user management.

Once a New Organization has been created, next we will create a Organization VDC (Virtual Data Center)

Click on Organizations VDCs and Create “NEW” Organization

Type a name of the organization you wish to create

Attach that organization to the provider virtual datacenter we created earlier

Select the allocaiton model, I have seen the Flex model be the most flexible to have the ability to have better control over the resources even at the VM level. More information is here on VMware’s website

For this demonstration, I am not allocating and resource I am giving my Tenant unlimited resources from my vSAN Cluster, but for a production environment you will want to use the proper allocation model and resources.

Select the Storage policy along with i like to enable Thin provision to save storage space!

Each organization will have its own Network Pool but it will run ontop of the Geneve overlay

About to finish up the setup of a VDC!

We have logged into the new Tenant space we have created! 🙂

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Cloud

Upgrading VMware Cloud Director to 10.3.3

by Tommy Grot
written by Tommy Grot 4 minutes read

Upgrading VMware Cloud Director from 10.3.2.1 to 10.3.3, primarily to fix a Security Vulnerability.

Also, there are some enhancements which follow:

What is New?!

The VMware Cloud Director 10.3.3 release provides bug fixes, API enhancements, and enhancements of the VMware Cloud Director appliance management user interface:

  • Backup and restore of VMware Cloud Director appliance certificates. VMware Cloud Director appliance management interface UI and API backup and restore now includes VMware Cloud Director certificates. See Backup and Restore of VMware Cloud Director Appliance in the VMware Cloud Director Installation, Configuration, and Upgrade Guide.
  • New /admin/user/{id}/action/takeOwnership API to reassign the owner of media.
  • Improved support for routed vApp network configuration of the MoveVApp API.

This release resolves resolves CVE-2022-22966. For information, see https://www.vmware.com/security/advisories.

There are also lots of fixes, if your VCD is having issues there is a possibility this upgrade could fix lots of issues!

All the Fixes are listed on this site : https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Cloud-Director/10.3.3/rn/vmware-cloud-director-1033-release-notes/index.html

First things first, lets download the newest release for VMware Cloud Director 10.3.3 – File Name: VMware_Cloud_Director_10.3.3.7659-19610875_update.tar.gz

Then shutdown your VCD Cells if you have multiple of them. Once they are turned off take a snapshot of all of them, along with the NFS Transfer Service Server usually it is a VM, take a snapshot of it too just in case you want to roll back if any issues occur.

Next we will want to upload the tar.gz file via WINSCP to the primary VCD Cell if you have a HA VCD topology, then the secondary get upgraded after the primary is finished.

I have logged into the VCD appliance with root account

Then open up a Putty session to the VCD appliance login as root,

Then change directory to /tmp/

Once in the directory:

Make Directory with the command below:

mkdir local-update-package

Start to upload the tar.gz file for the upgrade into /tmp/local-update-package via WINSCP

File has been successfully uploaded to the VCD appliance.

Then next steps we will need to prepare the appliance for the upgrade:

We will need to extract the update package in the new directory we created in /tmp/

tar -zxf VMware_Cloud_Director_v.v.v.v–nnnnnnnn_update.tar.gz \ -C /tmp/local-update-package

You can run the “ls” command and you shall see the tar.gz file along with manifest and package-pool

After you have verified the local update directory then we will need to set the update repository.

vamicli update – -repo file:///tmp/local-update-package

Check for update with this command after you have set the update package into the repository address

vamicli update – -check

Now, we see that we have a upgrade that is staged and almost ready to be ran! But, we will need to shutdown the cell(s) with this command

/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/cell-management-tool -u <admin username> cell –shutdown

Next is to take a backup of the database, so if your cloud director appliance was orginally version 10.2.x initially and you have upgraded it throughout its life span, then your next command will be little different which is /opt/vmware/appliance/bin/create-backup.sh – (which i have noticed it gets renamed during a upgrade process from 10.2.x to 10.3.1)

But if your appliance is 10.3.x and newer then /opt/vmware/appliance/bin/create-db-backup will be your backup to run.

I changed directory and went all the way down to the “bin” of the backup file and now i executed the script.

Backup was successful! Now, time for the install 🙂

Apply the upgrade for VCD, the command below will run will install the update

vamicli update – -install latest

Now, the next step is important, if you have any more VCD Cell appliances you will want to repeat first few steps and then just run the command below to upgrade the other appliances:

/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/upgrade

Select Y to Proceed with the upgrade

After successful upgrade, you may reboot VCD appliance and test!

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Cloud

Deploying VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.3

by Tommy Grot
written by Tommy Grot 4 minutes read

Todays topic is deploying VMware Cloud Director Availability for VMware Cloud Director! Todays topic is deploying VMware Cloud Director Availability for VMware Cloud Director! This walkthrough will guide you on how to deploy VCDA from a OVA to an working appliance. All this is created within my home lab. A different guide will be on how to setup VCDA and multi VCDs to create a Peer between and show some Migrations and so on! 🙂

A little about VCDA! – From VMware’s site

VMware Cloud Director Availabilityâ„¢ is a Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) solution. Between multi-tenant clouds and on-premises, with asynchronous replications, VMware Cloud Director Availability migrates, protects, fails over, and reverses failover of vApps and virtual machines. VMware Cloud Director Availability is available through the VMware Cloud Provider Program.VMware Cloud Director Availability introduces a unified architecture for the disaster recovery and migration of VMware vSphere Â® workloads. With VMware Cloud Director Availability, the service providers and their tenants can migrate and protect vApps and virtual machines:

  • From an on-premises vCenter Server site to a VMware Cloud Directorâ„¢ site
  • From a VMware Cloud Director site to an on-premises vCenter Server site
  • From one VMware Cloud Director site to another VMware Cloud Director site

Cloud SiteIn a single cloud site, one VMware Cloud Director Availability instance consists of:

  • One Cloud Replication Management Appliance
  • One or more Cloud Replicator Appliance instances
  • One Cloud Tunnel Appliance

Links!

Replication Flow – Link to VMware

  • Multiple Availability cloud sites can coexist in one VMware Cloud Director instance. In a site, all the cloud appliances operate together to support managing replications for virtual machines, secure SSL communication, and storage of the replicated data. The service providers can support recovery for multiple tenant environments that can scale to handle the increasing workloads.

Upload the OVA for VCDA

Create a friendly name within this deployment, i like to create a name that is meaningful and corellates to a service.

Proceed to step 4

Accept this lovely EULA 😛

Since in my lab for this deployment i did a combined appliance. I will also do a seperate applaince for each service configuration.

Choose the network segment you will have your VCDA appliance live on, i put my appiliance on a NSX-T backed segment on the overlay network.

Fill in the required information, also create an A record for the VCDA appliance so that when it does its recersive DNS it will succesffuly generate a self signed certificate and allow the appliance to keep building, successfuly.

After you hit submit and watch the deployment you can open the vmware web / remote console and just watch for any issues or errors that may cause the deployment to fail.

I ran into a snag! What happened was the network configuration did not accept all the information i filled in for the network adapter on the VCDA appliance OVA deployment. So here, I had to login as root into the VCDA appliance, it did force me to reset the password that I orginally set on the OVA deployment.

Connect to the VMware Cloud Director Availability by using a Secure Shell (SSH) client.

Open an SSH connection to Appliance-IP-Address.
Log in as the root user.

To retrieve all available network adapters, run: /opt/vmware/h4/bin/net.py nics-status

/opt/vmware/h4/bin/net.py nic-status ens160

/opt/vmware/h4/bin/net.py configure-nic ens160 — static –address 172.16.204.100/24 –gateway 172.16.204.1

After you have updated all the network configuration you can check the config by :

To retrieve the status of a specific network adapter,

/opt/vmware/h4/bin/net.py nic-status ens160

After the networking is all good, then you may go back to your web browser and go to the UI of the VCDA. Here we will configure next few steps.

Add the license you have recived for VCDA – this license is different than what VMware Cloud Director utilizes.

Configure the Site Details for your VCDA. I did Classic data engines since I do not have VMware on AWS.

Add your first VMware Cloud Director to this next step

Once you have added the first VCD, then you will be asked for the next few steps. Here we will add the look up service which is the vCenter Server lookup service along with the Replicator 1 which for my setup i did a combined appliance so the IP is the same as my deployment of VCDA but my port will be different.

Then I created a basic password for this lab simulation. Use a secure password!! 🙂

Once All is completed you shall see a dashboard like this below. We have successfully deployed VMware Cloud Director Availability! Next blog post we will get into the nitty gritty of the the migration and RPOs, and SLAs as we explore this new service which is a addon to VMware Cloud Director!

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Cloud

Photon OS Emergency Mode – Fix Corrupt Disk

by Tommy Grot
written by Tommy Grot 0 minutes read

For this little walk through, we will be using my VMware Cloud Director 10.3.2a applaince i have in my lab, it did not shut down safely so we will repair it! 🙂

Reboot the VMware Cloud Director appliance – then press ‘e’ immediatly to load into the GRUB, and at the end ot $systemd_cmdline add the following

” systemd.unit=emergency.target ”

Then hit F10 to boot

Run this following command to repaire the disk.

e2fsck -y /dev/sda3

Once Repaired – Shutdown VMware Cloud Director appliance and then power backon

VCD is now loading!

Successfully repaired a corrupted disk on Photon OS!

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