In my first post of the VCD Data Solution Extension (DSE) series, I discussed the architecture and installation workflow of DSE 1.3. The second post of the series covered the steps of deploying DSE in an airgap environment. DSE 1.4.0 introduced exciting new features, especially around backup and restoring database instances. You can read the DSE 1.4.0 release notes for the full list of the new features. In this post, I will walk through the steps of upgrading DSE from 1.3.0 to 1.4.0. The following steps explain the DSE upgrade workflow.   Step 1: Download the DSE 1.4 Installation Fil ..read more

In my last post of the VCD series, I discussed the installation & Configuration of VCD Data Solutions Extensions. In this post, I will walk through the steps of configuring the same in an airgap environment. In an airgap environment, artifacts are stored in an internal registry such as Harbor, Jfrog, etc. To install data solutions extension in the airgap environment, you have to first relocate the artifacts from the VMware public registry to your internal registry. Step 1: Relocate Artifacts To relocate the artifacts, you can use a Linux machine with imgpkg and coker utilities installed. R ..read more

What is VCD Data Solution? The VMware Cloud Director Extension for VMware Data Solutions is a plug-in for VCD that allows cloud providers to offer on-demand caching, messaging, and database software services at scale and thus expand their multi-tenant cloud infrastructure platform. The VCD Data Solutions include services such as VMware SQL with MySQL, VMware SQL with PostgreSQL, and RabbitMQ. These services are deployed on top of the Kubernetes clusters deployed using Container Service Extension. Tenants can install Grafana and Prometheus in their Kubernetes clusters to perform data analytics ..read more

Introduction Over the last few years, VCD has evolved as a true developer ready cloud. To start with, VCD enabled Service Providers to offer multi-tenant/multi-cluster Kubernetes as-a-Service through Container Service Extension and lately enabled integration with Tanzu Mission Control to simplify the Kubernetes management and visibility across environments through a single pane of glass. Software as a Service (SaaS) has emerged as a game-changer, offering a flexible and scalable approach to software delivery that aligns perfectly with the demands of modern businesses. To cater to this need, VC ..read more

Introduction to OIDC & OAuth 2.0 OpenID Connect (OIDC) is an identity authentication protocol that extends open authorization (OAuth) 2.0 to standardize the process for authenticating and authorizing users. The OAuth 2.0 protocol enables a third-party application (called a client) to access resources from a resource server (such as an API) on behalf of a user (referred to as a resource owner). The user provides the client with a limited access token, which it can use to request resources from the resource server. The OAuth 2.0 protocol provides security through scoped access tokens, and OI ..read more

Starting with VCD 10.2 and App Launchpad 2.0.0.1, it is possible to deploy App Launchpad using MQTT for communication with VCD. VCD 10.5 introduced a new feature called Content Hub as a replacement for App Launchpad. Service providers running VCD 10.5.x are encouraged to provide container/vm applications to tenants by integrating Content Hub with VMware MarketPlace and Helm repositories. In this post, I will demonstrate how you can delete MQTT enabled App Launchpad extension from VCD. Step 1: List Installed Extensions Method: GET URL: https://{{vcd_host}}/cloudapi/extensions/api Authorizat ..read more

App Launchpad is a VMware Cloud Director service extension that service providers can use to create and publish catalogs of deployment-ready applications. Tenant users can then deploy the applications with a single click. App Launchpad supports applications from the Bitnami applications catalog that are available in the VMware Cloud Marketplace.  You can create catalogs of your custom, in-house applications and configure App Launchpad to work with these catalogs. The older versions of the App Launchpad (<=2.0), use AMQP to communicate with VCD. Starting with App Launchpad v2.0.0.1, t ..read more

The older versions of VMware Cloud Director used AMQP protocol to exchange messages (such as system notifications or any other update) with another VCD cell. Starting with VCD 10.1, MQTT  replaced AMQP. To learn more about how VCD used MQTT, see product documentation. If you have an environment that still uses AMQP (e.g., VCD upgraded from version <=10.1) and wants to replace it with MQTT, you must first delete the AMQP broker settings from VCD. Unfortunately, it is not currently feasible to delete the settings from the GUI and must be done through APIs. In the VCD GUI, you only see 2 ..read more

My previous blog post discussed the VCD Extension for Tanzu Mission Control and covered the end-to-end deployment steps. In this post, I will cover how to troubleshoot a stuck TMC self-managed deployment in VCD. I was deploying TMC self-managed in a new environment, and during configuration, I made a mistake by passing an incorrect value for the DNS zone, leading to a stuck deployment that did not terminate automatically. I waited for a couple of hours for the task to fail, but the task kept on running, thus preventing me from installing it with the correct configuration. The deployment was s ..read more

Recently, I upgraded Container Service Extension to 4.2.0 in my lab and was trying to deploy a TKG 2.4.0 cluster with node health check enabled. The deployment got stuck after deploying one control plane and worker node, and the cluster went into an error state. Clicking on the Events tab showed the following error: I checked the CSE log file and the capvcd logs on the ephemeral vm (before it got deleted) and found no error that would make sense to me. I contacted CSE Engineering to discuss this issue and opened a bug for further analysis of the logs. Root Cause CSE Engineering debugged the ..read more