Monthly Archives: April 2020

How to Install App Launchpad for VMware Cloud Director

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App launchpad is one of the newest features that enhance the capabilities of VMware Cloud Director. This functionality will make life easier for tenants by allowing them to run applications with a few clicks.

In this post, I will walk through the steps of installing & configuring VMware App Launchpad. But before we dive into the lab, let’s understand the basics of App Launchpad.

VMware App Launchpad Introduction

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 is 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.

App Launchpad Architecture

The below image taken from VMware documentation illustrates the high-level architecture of App Launchpad.… Read More

What’s New in VMware Cloud Director 10.1

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With the release of v10.1 yesterday, vCloud Director has been rebranded to VMware Cloud Director. In this post I will cover what does Cloud Director brings to the table.

1: vCloud Director Rebranding: Upon logging into Cloud Director UI, you will no longer see the ‘v’ of vCloud Director. vCD  has been rebranded to VMware Cloud Director.

2: RIP Flex UI: Flex UI is no longer available in Cloud Director. In vCD 10.0, flex UI was disabled by default and if needed, it can be enabled back with cell-management-tool utility.

Note: Although the same command works in 10.1 also as shown below

But even after running this command, if you try to login to flash client, you will see a page not found error.… Read More

VMware Cloud Director-What’s New-NSX-T UI Enhancements

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With the release of VMware Cloud Director (Previously vCloud Director), a lot of NSX-T related UI enhancements are added. In this post I will walk through some of them.

Dedicated External Networks

With Cloud Director 10.1, an edge gateway can be provisioned with a dedicated external network. In this configuration, there is a one-to-one relationship between the external network and the edge gateway, and no other edge gateways can connect to this external network.

Note: Provider creates a T0 gateway within NSX-T and add it to Cloud Director as an external network. Once T0 is added, provider could convert an existing org gateway (T1) to this new dedicated T0, or create a new org gateway with Dedicated External Network option selected.

BGP and Route Advertisement

BGP peering  & Route Advertisement functionalities are added on Edge Gateway UI.

Route Advertisement

You can decide which of the network subnets that are attached to org gateway will be advertised to the dedicated external network.… Read More

Create vCAV Replication Policies via API

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Few days back I wrote a post on how to create Replication policies in vCloud Availability via GUI. In this post I will walk through steps of creating the same via API.

Below are high level steps of API workflow.

1: Get Auth Token

2: Create a New Replication Policy

Response Output: Make a note of the id of the policy from the response output.… Read More

How To Unregister vCAV 3.5 Plugin from vCenter

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Recently while working in lab, I came across situation where I had to remove the vCloud Availability 3.5 plugin from vCenter. To remove plugins from vCenter, we usually employ mob for this task, but removing the vCAV plugin follow different path. In this post I will walk through steps of doing the same.

Login to your vcsa appliance over SSH and execute following commands:

1: List vCAV plugin registrations in the vCenter Server Lookup service

Make a note of the Service ID from the output

2: Unregister vCAV plugin from the vCenter Lookup service, by providing the SSO credentials and using the Service Id fetched from  previous command.

3: Re run command from step 1 to verify vCAV plugin has been unregistered from lookup service. … Read More