PowerCLI

Automated Lab Deployment Script for vSphere with Tanzu using NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB)

04/05/2021 by William Lam 2 Comments

After spending a few days playing with the NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB) APIs, I am happy to share my latest automation lab deployment script for deploying vSphere with Tanzu using the new NSX ALB which was introduced with the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 2 release.

🙌 BOOM!!!

Fully Automated vSphere with @VMwareTanzu using the new @vmwarensx Advanced Load Balancer introduced in vSphere 7.0 Update 2 Lab Deployment in just 32 minutes! 🔥

Still need to clean up some things, but this beats clicking around the UI! My 🤲 thanks me pic.twitter.com/hN32Qk3oDc

— William Lam (@lamw) March 29, 2021

Lab Deployment Automation

You can find the new automation script along with all the details at the following Github Repo: https://github.com/lamw/vsphere-with-tanzu-nsx-advanced-lb-automated-lab-deployment#enable-workload-management

In my environment, it took about ~32 minutes for the deployment to finish, but YMMV based on the performance of your underlying hardware.

Workload Management Automation

In addition to the automated lab deployment script above, I have also updated my community VMware.WorkloadManagement module to add support for enabling Workload Management on a vSphere Cluster using NSX ALB. This is introduced as a new function creatively called New-WorkloadManagement3. You use the Get-Help cmdlet to get a list of supported arguments or you can take a look at this example.

Quick Tip – How to retrieve deleted VM history?

01/21/2021 by William Lam 3 Comments

Here is another question that can be solved by leveraging vCenter Server Events, which provides a lot of useful information, especially for historical operations and auditing purposes. Simliar to identifying where a VM was cloned from use case, we can also use vCenter events to retrieve the historical events for all VM deletions for a given vSphere environment.

One important thing to note is that when a VM or any other vSphere object for that matter that has been deleted, all references to that object is removed from vCenter Server. This means, we can not look for events for a give VM but instead, we need to look at the Task-based Event types to actually retrieve this information.

Putting this together, I have created a PowerCLI function called Get-VmDeleteHistory which can be installed directly from the PowerShell Gallery by running:

Install-Script -Name VmDeleteHistory

After connecting to your vCenter Server using the Connect-VIServer cmdlet, you can then run the Get-VmDeleteHistory function which uses the Get-VIEvent cmdlet and looks at the last 500 events. Below is an example output of what you will see which is the VM that was deleted, the User who performed the action along with the date and time.

If you want to look further back in history, you can provide the optional -MaxSamples parameter and that will allow you to specify the maximum number of events to look through.

Get-VmDeleteHistory -MaxSamples 1000

It is also important to understand that how far back you can go is based on your vCenter Server's Task/Event retention configuration.

Which VM was this vSphere VM cloned from?

01/11/2021 by William Lam Leave a Comment

This was a question that I saw back in December on the VMware {code} Slack which was quickly answered by the always awesome Luc Dekens. The solution is to look at vCenter Server Events, which are super rich in information and can be used for a number of things including identifying the source VM that it was cloned from. When I was a customer, this was something I did all the time, using events for auditing purposes but also identifying who, what and when a certain operation was performed including source VMs for cloning operations.

Although this information maybe known to some, there is still not an elegant solution that can help someone quickly identify the source VM for a specific vSphere VM that was cloned. This topic also intrigued me as I have seen this question come up in the past. I figure I might as well add this to my random scripting backlog and take a look when I had some time.

Before taking a look at the solution, it is important to understand the different types of clones that exists in vSphere today and also the respective vCenter Server events that can help us correlate to both the source VM but also the specific clone type.

Cloning Types

Full Clone - An independent copy of a virtual machine that shares nothing with the parent virtual machine after the cloning operation. Ongoing operation of a full clone is entirely separate from the parent virtual machine
Linked Clone - A copy of a virtual machine that shares virtual disks with the parent virtual machine in an ongoing manner. This conserves disk space, and allows multiple virtual machines to use the same software installation
Instant Clone - An independent copy of a virtual machine that starts executing from the exact running state of the source powered on virtual machine. Instant Clone uses rapid in-memory cloning of a running parent virtual machine and copy-on-write, simliar to that of Linked Cloning to rapidly deploy virtual machines

Automating HAProxy VM deployment with 3-NIC configuration using PowerCLI

11/02/2020 by William Lam Leave a Comment

When deploying the HAProxy VM as part of vSphere with Tanzu, customers have the option of deploying the HAProxy VM using either a 2-NIC or 3-NIC configuration. The default OVF Deployment Option is the 2-NIC design called "Default" and the 3-NIC design is called "Frontend".

From an Automation point of view, you can use either OVFTool or PowerCLI to automate the deployment. For a 2-NIC example, you can refer to my Automated vSphere with Tanzu Lab Deployment Script. However, for the 3-NIC example, a few folks were running into some issues when using PowerCLI for the automation.

The main issue is that because the default OVF Deployment Option is the 2-NIC design (Default), the two additional OVF properties frontend_ip and frontend_gateway is basically hidden when processing the OVF properties when PowerCLI.

Note: You can view these optional properties by running the following OVFTool command: ovftool --X:enableHiddenProperties vmware-haproxy-v0.1.8.ova

Even if you specified the "Frontend" OVF Deployment Option, PowerCLI does not seem to have the logic to retrieve the other optional parameters and hence can not be set as part of the initial deployment.

Using PowerCLI and vSphere Tags to create/migrate HCX Mobility Groups to VMware Cloud SDDC

10/21/2020 by William Lam Leave a Comment

If using your voice to create an HCX Mobility Group and initiate a migration to a VMware Cloud SDDC is not your thing, here is a more practical example using PowerCLI which includes HCX cmdlets that was introduced awhile back.

Here are the 12 configurable variables that you will need to update based on your own environment.

$VC_SERVER="vcsa.vmware.corp"
$VC_USERNAME="*protected email*"
$VC_PASSWORD="VMware1!"
$HCX_SERVER="hcx.vmware.corp"

$VSPHERE_TAG_CATEGORY="Cloud"
$VSPHERE_TAG_NAME="VMC"

# vMotion, Bulk, Cold, RAV, OsAssistedMigration
$MIGRATION_TYPE="RAV"

$TARGET_NETWORK_NAME="L2E_HOL-10-f58e483b"
$TARGET_DATASTORE_NAME="WorkloadDatastore"
$TARGET_RESOURCE_POOL_NAME="Compute-ResourcePool"
$TARGET_VM_FOLDER_NAME="Workloads"

$MOBILITY_GROUP_NAME="VMworld-2020-Demo"

$VC_SERVER="vcsa.vmware.corp"

$VC_USERNAME="*protected email*"

$VC_PASSWORD="VMware1!"

$HCX_SERVER="hcx.vmware.corp"

$VSPHERE_TAG_CATEGORY="Cloud"

$VSPHERE_TAG_NAME="VMC"

# vMotion, Bulk, Cold, RAV, OsAssistedMigration

$MIGRATION_TYPE="RAV"

$TARGET_NETWORK_NAME="L2E_HOL-10-f58e483b"

$TARGET_DATASTORE_NAME="WorkloadDatastore"

$TARGET_RESOURCE_POOL_NAME="Compute-ResourcePool"

$TARGET_VM_FOLDER_NAME="Workloads"

$MOBILITY_GROUP_NAME="VMworld-2020-Demo"

Automating Workload Management on vSphere with Tanzu

10/20/2020 by William Lam 6 Comments

As promised, here is the complimentary solution to my existing Automated vSphere with Tanzu Lab Deployment Script, which will automatically deploy and configure the required infrastructure (vCenter Server Appliance, ESXi, vSAN and HAProxy VMs) so that you can quickly jump to enabling Workload Management on your vSphere Cluster.

FYI: Ben Corrie, one of the Engineers on the vSphere with Tanzu team recently published a vSphere with Tanzu 4-Part Deep Dive video series where he walks you through in deploying everything from scratch along with the concepts that should help you better understand how vSphere with Tanzu works. He is actually doing this in his own personal homelab and thought this might be useful to share with others. Kudos Ben and highly recommend folks check out his video if you new to vSphere with Tanzu and Kubernetes.

Enabling Workload Management is a manual step after the automated deployment script and as you know, I prefer to automate as much as I can. I have updated my existing PowerCLI Workload Management Module to now also support the new vSphere with Tanzu capability using HAProxy for networking instead of NSX-T. The module can be downloaded from PowerShell Gallery by simply running