I received an interesting question from one of my customers about the behaviour of vSAN with regards to policy changes to a policy which is applied to a content library and then especially the templates that reside within it. The customer told me that when they changed the Default vSAN Policy that was attached to a content library, the OVF-templates inside that content library, were not updated to comply with the changes made to the policy. So I tried that out in my lab environment. As I understand it (and see when I work with it), the Content Library vSAN Storage Policy is based on the vSAN D ..read more

I deployed vRealize Suite LifeCycle Manager earlier (see: https://my-sddc.net/vcf-on-vcd-aria-vrealize-suite-lifecycle-manager/ and https://my-sddc.net/vcf-on-vcd-importing-other-aria-components/) and now want to upgrade them. Since the interoperability between SDDC Manager and Aria Suite LifeCycle Manager is the one I need to look at, it shows me I can upgrade to the latest version currently available, 8.14: But I need to do this in two steps. First upgrade 8.10 to Aria Suite Lifecycle 8.12 and after that, upgrade to 8.14: So I start with downloading the two upgrade ISO’s I will need: Afte ..read more

First I deployed Aria Suite LifeCycle Manager (although still called vRealize for that version): https://my-sddc.net/vcf-on-vcd-aria-vrealize-suite-lifecycle-manager/, then I deployed vIDM (https://my-sddc.net/vcf-on-vcd-vmware-identity-manager/), but if I now want to deploy additional components, we don’t get to choose the size, below a certain threshold. For instance, if I want to deploy Aria Automation (vRealize Automation), it’s minimum size is clustered. Aria Operations (vRealize Operations or vROPs) is minimum “Medium”: So I will deploy the Aria Suite products manually and then import t ..read more

After deploying the Edge Clusters on both VCF environments and creating and connecting the T0’s, it’s time to deploy some Aria Suite components. For this I will first be deploying the Aria Suite LifeCycle Manager (or vRealize, as it is still called, because of the version), from within the SDDC Manager. After that is completed, I can use this appliance to deploy and manage the Aria components. This is a split between the two control components SDDC Manager and Aria Suite LifeCycle Manager that make the dependency between SDDC Manager and the Aria components a lot less strict. And that reduces ..read more

After deploying Aria Suite LifeCycle Manager (although it was still called vRealize then), we go and deploy VMware Identity Manager (vIDM). For this we have a couple of requirements: Installation media IP Address Certificate First, we have to populate the ASLCM with the correct product. For now, we are just going to download VMware Identity Manager 3.3.7. For this, we go to: (there are more boxes to the right, but for the sake of grabbing the screen, I omitted those). And click on Add binaries: Select “My VMware” and click “Discover”: this will populate the list of available products. Fro ..read more

Next step in my VCF on VCF journey is building the networking between the two environments. Of course, I have my trusted pfSense appliances that do the routing, but of course, I want to be able to create my own NSX-based virtual network. So the first steps are to create a little design on what I want to accomplish. So in the first phase, I will be creating Edge Node clusters on both VCF WLD’s and configuring BGP between them, for dynamic routing. I will not be using the pfSense appliances for now, just a direct connection, based on the NSX-components, with stretched VLAN’s as a transportation ..read more

From one of my customers, I got a question on how they can downsize a stretched cluster in a VCF environment. This is basically following the first 5 steps in the “Replace a Failed Host in a Stretched Cluster” article: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Cloud-Foundation/5.0/vcf-admin/GUID-92FD3AEE-5B5F-421C-B722-44AE0314D84E.html So I though, I’d try it out. We need to do the following steps: Get Host ID’s Get Cluster ID Prepare JSON file Run JSON file Decommission hosts So, first, we get the Host ID’s. For this we go to the “Developer Center” in the SDDC Manager and click on: API Explorer ..read more

Because I have had some issues with my lab in the past (having to rebuild it a couple of times) I switched my storage to iSCSI (see https://my-sddc.net/vcf-on-vcd-iscsi-configuration/), but I also wanted to have another means of redundancy and for that I am using vSphere Replication. I will replicate my two VCF instances to each other. The following setup is what I will be aiming for: So the “odd” volumes are Production and the “even” volumes are Replication (I will make that visible in the name as well). First step is install a vSphere Replication appliance, for this we deploy an OVF, select ..read more

Because my lab has seen a couple of failures, with regards to storage, I got the advice to move my Management VM’s away from the vSAN, since a distributed storage layer on top of a distributed storage layer is not the best option, from a availability perspective. So I have been building a couple of Truenas iSCSI servers, in order to store my VM’s there and at the same time configure some replication, so I am safe from any issues with storage. So, to start, we import the appliance, which contains TrueNAS-13.0-U4. I have added one additional NIC, in order to make it an ActiveiSCSI configuration ..read more

Normally I am not that much into “step by step” upgrades of any kind, but since VCF 5 dropped today, I thought, maybe show how incredibly simple upgrading is. So first of all, make sure that you see the version within “Release Versions”: Then we can go and download the necessary components, in “Bundle Management”: There we download all the necessary bundles: VMware Cloud Foundation Update 5.0.0.0 – Upgrade bundle VMware Cloud Foundation Update 5.0.0.0 – Configuration drift bundle VMware Software Update 5.0.0.0 – NSX 4.1.0.2.0 VMware Software Update 5.0.0.0 – VMware vCenter Server 8.0U1a VMw ..read more