virtuallyGhetto

Resource Pools, Folders & VMC now supported with Cross vCenter vMotion Utility Fling

07/18/2018 by William Lam Leave a Comment

Many of you are already familiar with the Cross vCenter vMotion Utility, which was released as a Fling last year. In fact, a number of you have even shared your VM migration numbers, many of which are quite impressive (e.g. 5-10K VMs). Not only are the number of production VMs significant, but I also learned the duration of customer migration projects, such as datacenter evacuation, was able to complete significantly faster with the help of this tool.

Although v2.1 was just recently released, Vishal, the lead developer is constantly looking for ways to improve the tool. Most recently, we had a few customers ask for supporting additional placement targets such as vSphere VM Folders and Resource Pools. Customers often use VM Folders for organization purposes but also as a way to manage permissions and of course resource management with the use of Resource Pools (not for organization purposes ;)). These two stand alone feature are quite useful on their own, but they are also a building block to allow us to support migrating workloads to and from VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) which we have received requests for as well. VMC has a restrictive permission model and customer workloads must be placed in a specific VM Folder and Resource Pool, both of which was not initially supported with the Cross vCenter vMotion Utility.

With the latest v2.2. release, customers will now have the ability to optionally specify a target Resource Pool and/or VM Folder by enabling an Advanced settings option at the upper right hand corner of the tool as shown in the screenshot below.

Below is a screenshot of vMotion'ing 3 running PhotonOS VMs from onPrem environment to my VMC's SDDC. The Fling supports both hot and cold relocate, however for vMotion to work you will need to ensure that your source vCenter Server (including ESXi hosts) are running vSphere 6.7 and the VM is configured with the new Per-VM EVC (requires vHW 14) which can be configured in the vSphere H5 Client.

Give the latest Fling a try and let us know what you think, if you have any feedback or request, feel free to leave a comment on the Fling page.

Automating VM Template management using Content Library in VMC

07/17/2018 by William Lam 1 Comment

Today, the vSphere Content Library only supports a single deployable VM type using the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard. Although customers are familiar with both OVF and OVA (archive of OVF and VMDKs), support for vCenter VM Template is still one of the most highly requested feature for Content Library. This should come as no surprise since many of our customers have built operational procedures and automation workflows for managing VM deployments over the years and simply switching to another format has a significant impact to their existing workflows.

I know the Content Library team has been heads down working on a number of enhancements to Content Library and it looks like one of these improvements has recently made its way out onto VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) which I had just noticed while working in my SDDC.

In VMC, when you right click on a VM and select "Clone as Template to Library", there will be a new option to capture a VM as a VM Template (VMTX) within a Content Library!

New SDDC Certificate Replacement Fling

07/11/2018 by William Lam 7 Comments

Certificate lifecycle management is not something anyone looks forward to, it is time consuming and usually not automated. However, it is a necessity for many of our customers. The process gets even more challenging when needing replace certificates across multiple VMware products, not only careful orchestration but also properly reestablishing trust between product just adds another layer of operational complexity. Within the Integrated System Business Unit (ISBU) at VMware, which produces both the VMware Validated Design (VVD) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), the team has been working on a way to simplify certificate management, not only for individual products (working with product teams) but also holistically at the VMware SDDC level.

This initially started with the development of a tool called Certificate Generation Utility (CertGen), which helps customers generate new certificates for various products within the VMware SDDC. Although it was developed for the VVD, any VMware customer who consumed products within the VVD, could also leverage this tool. We all know certificate generation can be a pain, but it is not as challenging or as complex as the actual certificate replacement process itself which is also fully documented by the VVD team here.

This is where the new Fling comes in, the SDDC Certificate Tool, which automates the manual steps outlined by the VVD and helps customers easily replace certificates that they have created (CertGen or another process) and automatically orchestrates this across the different products within the SDDC. The tool is command-line driven and uses a JSON configuration file which can contain all or a subset of the VMware SDDC products, which is great for supporting different environments and allows for easy source control. Extensive pre-checks are also built into the tool to validate the certificates themselves (e.g. expiry, chain validation, etc) also also preventing miss-match of information (e.g. SAN entries, number of nodes, etc) which then get compared against your actual environment before any changes are applied. The JSON also contains a section referred to as Service Accounts, which is merely other VMware product accounts that the tool supports to reestablish trust after replacing the certificate for given product.

My list of Microsoft Visual Code Studio Extensions

07/03/2018 by William Lam Leave a Comment

I have been a huge fan of Microsoft Visual Code Studio since it was introduced to me about a year ago and has been my default editor of choice (outside of vi for quick edits and even Code has a vi extension which I had used for awhile but it had some quirks). Last week I had shared on Twitter a screenshot of all the extensions I personally use, since this was something I get asked about from time to time.

I received a lot of positive feedback and I even learned about a few new extensions from a few folks. I figure I would provide the list of plugins I use as text which can then easily be searched directly in Code or via the Visual Studio Marketplace. Code itself supports a number of command-line options, including extension management and so I used the following command to generate the list of extensions I am currently using:

Auditing detailed operations within VMware Cloud on AWS using the Activity Log API

06/29/2018 by William Lam Leave a Comment

All operations (UI or API) that occurs within VMware Cloud AWS (VMC), including but not limited to SDDC creation, deletion, updates, network configurations, user authorization/access, etc. is all captured as part of the Activity Log in the VMC Console. Within the Activity Log, customers will be able view the type of operation, the time the operation occurred, the applicable SDDC as well the user of the operation and all of these fields can be filtered out further.

The UI is great for quickly looking up quick changes, however for customers who require auditing level logging, this may not be sufficient. This was actually a question that I had received from a customer who was interested in getting more details but also a way to send this information back to their on-premises environment for auditing purposes. Luckily, the Activity Log actually stores a lot more information than what is shown in the UI and all of this data is available through the VMC API.

All entries are scoped within a VMC Organization and you can use the following APIs to retrieve all activities or a specific activity given the VMC Task Id:

GET /orgs/{org}/tasks - List all tasks for organization
GET /orgs/{org}/tasks/{task} - Get task details

Retrieving detailed per-VM space utilization on VSAN

06/27/2018 by William Lam Leave a Comment

I was recently helping out my friend Paudie O'Riordan with a request from a customer who was looking for a way to collect detailed space utilization for their VMs (VM Home, VMDK & swap) running on VSAN. Today, this level of granularity is not available in the vSphere UI and the customer was interested in both the used and reserved capacity on a per-VM basis. Luckily, this information can be retrieved using the VSAN Management API.

To do so, we just need to use the VsanQueryObjectIdentities() API method, which I have used in the past to retrieve things like "thick" provisioned VM and translating VSAN Object IDs to their friendly VM display name. To retrieve space utilization information, we just need to set the includeSpaceSummary property to be true. While developing the PowerCLI sample script, I found that this specific property is currently not supported when querying vCenter Server and to retrieve this information, you must go directly to each ESXi host within the VSAN Cluster. I have already filed a feature request and it looks like this will be fixed in a future vSphere release.