In this post, I will guide you through the process of upgrading VCD from version 10.4.2 to version 10.5.1. Although VCD 10.5.1 is considered as a patch release from version 10.5.0, however it came with a lot of new features and enhancements as per the below release notes. https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Cloud-Director/10.5.1/rn/vmware-cloud-director-1051-release-notes/index.html Upgrade Prerequisites Step1: Check VMware’s interoperability matrix to make sure VCD 10.5.1 is compatible with the existing solutions such as vSphere, NSX, NSXALB, … This depends on the solutions you have integrated ..read more

I have written a previous post on how to capture traffic on Tier0 gateway uplink in NSX 3.x via CLI. VMware NSX-T 3.x: Traffic Capture on Tier-0 Gateway Uplink However, and as per the release of NSX 4.0.0.1, you can use the Live Traffic Analysis tool to perform packet capture on NSX Edge interfaces via the NSX Manager UI portal. https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-NSX/4.0/rn/vmware-nsx-4001-release-notes/index.html In this post, I will guide you through the steps to use “Live Traffic Analysis Tool” from the NSX Manager User Interface (UI) to capture packets from the uplink interface of an NSX ..read more

Recently I was delivering a professional services engagement for one of our VMware Cloud Providers where we deployed VMware Cloud Director (VCD) version 10.5.0 integrated with NSX 4.1.1. Upon validating the functionality of the environment, i noticed a weird behavior with the creation of edge gateway firewall rules in VCD 10.5.0. I have tried multiple times to create a new edge firewall rule, however it takes forever just saying “please wait” without showing any error or progress and the rule is not created.  The default “drop any any” edge firewall rule can be modified and saved succes ..read more

In this post, I will walk you through the process to delete a Workspace ONE Access (WS1A) global environment from the Aria Suite Lifecycle. The ‘Delete Environment’ option is grayed out for ‘globalenvironment’ in Aria Suite Lifecycle UI. In this case, API can come into rescue. Before proceeding with the below procedure, make sure to take snapshot of Aria Suite Lifecycle, Workspace ONE Access node(s) and it’s integrated products in the current state. Step1: In a Web browser, login to https://<Aria Suite Lifecycle FQDN or IP Address> using admin@local credentials. As you see, we have a g ..read more

As you may know, NSX ALB is the only available option that allows LBaaS offering through VCD when NSX-T is used as the network backing type for the OrgVDCs. The native NSX-T loadbalancer isn’t used in VCD. Accordingly VCD will have to be integrated with NSX ALB for LBaaS offering. After you prepare both NSX-T and NSX ALB environments, you will register your AVI controllers and NSX-T clouds with VCD, and import the service engine groups to be consumed by the organizations when creating virtual services through their tenant portals. However, you have to first enable load balancing on the Org ed ..read more

This post will not show you how to configure the HTTPS load balancer for VMware Cloud Director (VCD). There are multiple public articles that cover the details for such LB configuration. In this post, I will shed the light on a hidden feature that should be tuned on AVI so that you don’t experience the below issue “Unable to perform query” when accessing the VCD UI through the HTTPS load balancer virtual service configured on NSX ALB 22.1.1 and greater versions. If you check the logs on the AVI load balancer you can see the below 502 error message highlighted in yellow: Response Abnormal eve ..read more

During VMware NSX Manager cluster deployment, and after the OVA deployment of the first NSX manager and adding the vCenter server as a compute manager, you may encounter the below error message while trying to provision the 2nd NSX manager from the NSX portal. Error occured during vmdk transfer. java.net.SocketTimeoutException connect timed out Normally this occurs when there is a communication issue between the NSX managers and the ESXi hosts where the three NSX managers will be running, more specifically the provisioning service. The solution is to such issue is as per below: Click on DE ..read more

This post will walk you through the steps that you can follow to enable SSH login for root account if it was disabled during the deployment of the NSX-T manager OVA appliance. If you deployed the NSX-T manager appliance and you didn’t allow root SSH logins due to your company security regulations, then you realized that you require such elevated login later on through SSH (rather than opening the VM console), then this post is for you. 1) Open the NSX-T Manager VM console and login as root. 2) Edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config in vim editor by modifying the following lines, the save the file. Chang ..read more

Recently I was deploying VMware Cloud Director as part of an engagement for a Cloud Provider customer and I faced a couple of issues connecting to their Linux NFS server. I am writing this post to share with you the issues and error messages I got along with resolution steps to be able to complete the VAMI setup of the VCD cell. I have deployed Cloud Director 10.3.x OVA template, the template deployment itself went fine, after which I turned the Cloud Director VM on. Then, I went to VAMI interface (:5480) to continue with the setup, as per VMware documentation. At the first step “NFS mount fo ..read more

I came into a scenario recently where we need to decommission a cluster from a provider PVDC where that cluster also contains workloads already provisioned by the customer through the VCD tenant portal. In order to do so, we need to migrate a bunch of workloads for an organization from the orgVDC under workload cluster2 (the one to be decommissioned) to the orgVDC under workload cluster1 knowing that both workload cluster1 and cluster2 are part of an elastic PVDC spanning both clusters. There may be other ways to do the migration but I want to share my simple procedure that i followed which m ..read more