Category: VMware

vCloud HCL generator for Terraform

 

vCloud Director is one of the VMware products which help service providers with the public cloud delivery. As with the most VMware products, developers can communicate with it by API. So if something has API, it may have its own Terraform Provider! To be honest, I use vSphere Provider more than vCloud, but sometimes it’s better to use Terraform instead of using GUI or even PowerCLI. Of course, I don’t save the states of my infrastructure, because I don’t need to destroy or change it later, but I can save my time during the creation of new infrastructure. One of Continue reading

“Unable to expire password for root” – Debian 9 in vCloud Director

 

Debian 9 was released on 17th of June 2017, and for me, it was not only the information about the arriving upgrades. Also, it was the sign of the new vCloud Director template. I started making it on Monday, and I faced the problem with customization. Of course, I used Open-VM-Tools because I try to use them everywhere. I had many problems with customization, but it was the first time when I had a problem with password customization on a Linux guest OS – I got “unable to expire password for root” error. Fortunately, I took one look at the Continue reading

Cannot customize CentOS on vCloud Director

 

Last week I spent some time creating and updating vCloud Director templates. It’s a very long process if you want to do everything perfectly. You know, one mistake and you have to deploy the vApp, change the configuration, update metadata and add vApp to catalog one more time. During this process, I faced the problem with CentOS 7.3. It was a fresh installation from official DVD iso. Everything worked fine except one thing – customization. Of course, I chose the open-vm-tools package and made sure that daemon is running, but customization didn’t want to work properly. Finally, I found the Continue reading

Using Terraform to deploy VM with an additional disk in vSphere

 

Some time ago I wrote a post, which explains how to deploy VM in vSphere using a Terraform. It’s something like a universal Terraform configuration for vSphere. You don’t need to manually specify any variable. The most vars are based on the variable mappings. Today I want to show you another code – this time you will see how to create a VM with an additional disk. In theory, it doesn’t need many changes, but I am not confined just to create a disk. I also want to make it usable by the Operating System and ensure that disk will Continue reading

PowerCLI in the PowerShell Gallery – how to and why?

 

PowerCLI is the best managing and automation tool for vSphere environments. I cannot imagine my work without this fantastic thing. The only one inconvenience I see in the PowerCLI is an installation procedure. In every single Windows I have to download and install .msi package. But now it has changed! We can find PowerCLI in the PowerShell Gallery – now there are two versions, 6.5.1.5377412 and 6.5.1.5273662. How to install PowerCLI from the PowerShell Gallery? Installation process is very simple. You just need to type the following command in your PowerShell (don’t forget to run as Administrator):

If you cannot install because of “The Continue reading

Alias for Connect-VIServer arguments – PowerShell functions

 

I think most of you agree with me when I say that typing “Connect-VIServer -Server name-of-server” is very annoying. Especially when you have many vCenter Servers to manage. First thing that comes to everybody’s mind is “hey, we can use PowerShell aliases”! And yes, but only for shorten cmdlet. You can have some problems with passing parameters into the alias. But don’t worry, there is another – better in my opinion – way to do that. Functions. It’s a simple way for creating aliases for Connect-VIServer arguments. Without further ado, there you are a template of the mentioned functions: View the code Continue reading

Fun with PowerCLI – how to get Windows VMs in vCloud Director

 

Honestly speaking, I’m in love with PowerCLI. I know that VMware admin cannot optimize his job without PowerCLI, but in my case it’s a higher level of scripting love. At first, I want to stress that my scripting experience started with Linux systems and its scripting languages. I have been in awe of how excellent PowerShell can be since I decided to simplify my work with Windows Servers. Of course VMware administration has enforced me to become friends with PowerShell. New cmdlets, new possibilities, and – last but not least – the best way for managing and configuring VMware vSphere Continue reading

Deploying vSphere VM with Terraform

 

Do you know when infrastructure deploying was revolutionized? It was the day when the world saw the Terraform for the first time. Yes, Infrastructure as a Code is a great idea which can simplify our infrastructure provisioning. We can see the full power of the Terraform just with an AWS, but it can be also used with another Cloud Providers. In the Terraform documentation, you can find Google Cloud, Digital Ocean, Microsoft Azure, but also private and on-premise providers like Openstack or VMware vSphere. I work with VMware vSphere and VMware vCloud Director, so Terraform is designed for me too! Continue reading

ESXi upgrade permission denied

 

There are many bad things which can happen during the infrastructure upgrade. Sometimes it is caused by a sysadmin mistake, sometimes it may be a software bug, but it really does not matter what the main reason is. You must fix it. Nowadays we have much easier job than – for instance – twenty years ago. Now we have Google, lots of blogs and other pages with millions of information. However, we should follow the way created on our own. Take a look on this scenario: