How To Unregister vCAV 3.5 Plugin from vCenter

Manish Jha

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

Upgrading vCloud Availability From 3.0 to 3.5

Manish Jha

In this post I will walk through steps of upgrading vCloud Availability deployment upgrade from version 3.0 to 3.5.

If you have missed earlier posts of this series, I would recommend reading them from below links:

1: vCAV 3.0-Provider Setup

2: vCAV 3.0-Replication Policies

3: vCAV 3.0-Tenant Setup

vCloud Availability upgrade can be performed via various methods (CLI & UI). These methods are very well documented Here 

Upgrading vCloud Availability in the Cloud

Before upgrading vCAV in service provider side, we need to ensure that environment is configured as per Pre-Upgrade requirement.

vCloud Availability Upgrade Sequence

For a multi site vCloud Availability deployment, upgrade the sites in the following order:

  • Upgrade all vCloud Availability appliances in the local cloud site.
  • Upgrade all vCloud Availability appliances in remote cloud sites.
  • Upgrade all vCloud Availability On-Premises Appliance nodes.

In a vCloud Availability cloud site, upgrade all the appliances in following sequence:

  • Upgrade the vCloud Availability Cloud Replication Management Appliance.
… Read More

Configuring vCloud Availability 3.0-Part 3:Tenant Setup

Manish Jha

In first Part of vCAV 3.0 series, we learnt about service provider side configuration and in last Post we discussed about Replication Policies in vCAV. In this post I will walk through steps of configuring on-prem environment with vCAV. 

To configure on-prem environment to work with vCAV, you need to first download the vCAV 3.0 Appliance for Tenants which is located Here

Deployment of appliance is very straight forward like any other vmware product. Below slideshow shows the deployment steps.

Once the appliance boots up, make a note of the login url.

vcav-onprem-10

Login to vCAV on-prem appliance by typing https://<vcav-fqdn>/ui/admin

You will be prompted to change root password on first login.

vcav-onprem-11

Click Run initial setup wizard. 

On first page of wizard, specify the site name. When you pair the on-prem appliance with Cloud Site, your environment will be identified using this site name.

vcav-onprem-12

Enter vCenter lookup service details and sso credentials and hit Next.… Read More

Configuring vCloud Availability 3.0-Part 2: Replication Policies

Manish Jha

In last post we learnt how to perform vCloud Availability 3.0 end to end configuration. But before we can jump into performing tenant side configuration, we need to configure Replication Policies.

Replication policies are sets of rules that define and control the replication attributes on a vCD organization level. Typically a replication policy enforces following attributes:

  • Whether an organization can be used as a replication source.
  • Whether an organization can be used as a replication destination.
  • The minimum Recovery Point Objective (RPO) for an organization.
  • The maximum number of retained snapshots per single virtual machine replication for an organization.
  • The maximum number of virtual machine replications that can be created for an organization.

Note: A single replication policy can be assigned to multiple vCD organizations. 

Create a Replication Policy

You can edit and use the default replication policy that comes with vCAV or you can create a new one based on your requirements. … Read More

Configuring vCloud Availability 3.0-Part 1:Provider Setup

Manish Jha

Recently I got chance to work on setting up vCloud Availability 3.x version in my test environment and it was a great learning curve. I will share my experience through series of blog posts so that it can help wider audience to understand every nuance’s of this wonderful product. 

I am not going to write any introduction post on what is vCAV and its architecture. Its very well documented Here

If you have worked on previous version of vCAV (2.0 & 1.5), you might remember it was a pain setting up various appliances. With vCAV 3.0, installation & configuration has been simplified drastically. No more hanky panky command line stuff. Now you just need 2 ova files for setting up cloud and on-prem infrastructure.

In this post I will cover cloud (service provider) side deployment & configuration steps.

Below screenshot shows steps of vCAV appliance deployment. 

Note: For lab deployment/POC we can use combined appliance deployment topology.… Read More

Automating vCloud Usage Meter Deployment & Configuration via API

Manish Jha

In my last Post I covered manual steps of vCloud Usage Meter deployment & configuration. In this post I will show how we can leverage Usage Meter API’s to perform end to end configuration.

Usage Meter Deployment: There is no API for UM deployment and we have to stick to ovftool method for this step.

… Read More

Installing & Configuring vCloud Usage Meter

Manish Jha

What is Usage Meter?

vCloud Usage Meter is an on-premises virtual appliance that is used to collect and generate reports for Cloud Provider Partners (VCPP) to send back to VMware for monthly billing of usage.

Usage Meter collects usage of most of the VMware products that are installed in cloud providers datacenter. Current version of Usage Meter (4.1) supports usage collection from following endpoints:

UM-Endpoints

How Usage Meter collects and report monthly product consumption data, is explained Here

vCloud Usage Insight

vCloud Usage Insight is a VMware cloud service that aggregates and automates monthly and end user reporting from on-premise vCloud Usage Meter instances to the VMware Cloud Provider Commerce Portal. With vCloud Usage Insight, you retain full control over the usage report data in Commerce Portal before submission.

To learn more about vCloud Usage Meter & Usage Insight please check VMware official Documentation

Usage Meter Installation Requirements

I am not going to cover nitty-gritty of installation pre-requisites as everything is well documented Here

vCloud Usage Meter is distributed as virtual appliance (ova) and can be downloaded from Here

vCloud UM deployment is pretty straight forward like any other ova deployment.… Read More

Automating vROPs Tenant Appliance Deployment & Configuration via API

Manish Jha

In my previous post on vROPs Tenant Appliance for vCD, I covered steps of manual deployment & configuration. In this post I will cover how we can achieve this via CLI/API.

These API’s can be leveraged via any scripting language to automate the deployment of vROPs TA.

Step 1: Deploy vROPs Tenant Appliance via ovftool

As of now there is no API for automating deployment of appliance via API, so we will use ovftool for this purpose.

… Read More

Upgrading vCSA 6.7 to 7.0 via CLI

Manish Jha

In my current project I have been tasked with identifying the process of VCSA upgrade via CLI so that same can be automated via code and eventually enabling customers to upgrade vCenter server in one click.

During my research I came to know that unfortunately there are no API calls as of now to upgrade vcsa and we have to rely on the CLI installer method. 

vCenter Upgrade Process Overview

Those who have worked on VCSA upgrade in past, VCSA upgrade is not an in-place upgrade and it is a 2 step process.

  • Stage1 is where you gather all the necessary information such as source and target appliance details, target Esxi host/vCenter to deploy appliance and vCenter credentials etc. A new appliance with target version is deployed during the process.
  • In Stage2 data (configuration, historical, and performance metrics) migration is performed from source VCSA to newly deployed VCSA.

During upgrade, the newly deployed appliance is deployed via a temporary IP and once all data is migrated from source appliance, it is shut down and the new appliance is reconfigured with same IP which was configured in source. … Read More

Installing & Configuring vCD Content Pack in vRLI via API

Manish Jha

In this post we will learn how to install vCD content pack in vRealize Log Insight via API. 

What is vCD Content pack?

As per VMware official documentation:

The VMware vCloud Director content pack provides you unparalleled visibility into your vCD environment from 5.5 to the new 9.x SP. Providing graphical representations of important log data, metrics of your vCD workloads and a robust set of alerts this content pack will allow you to better manage vCD utilizing Log Insight’s capabilities.

Installing content packs in vRLI is one of the day 2 operations that most VMware Admins do in their day to day job. In large datacenters where there are several instances of vRLI, configuring content packs & agents via UI is a very tedious and time consuming process. You can use API’s to automate these day 2 tasks to reduce time and to minimize human errors. So let’s get started.… Read More