The API for VCF is hands down, one of the most powerful in the industry. Allowing you to accomplish everything from scheduling backups, to rotating certificates and passwords across the deployment, to deploying an NSX Edge Cluster complete with Tier-0 and Tier-1 routers configured!

While the Developer Center is a great place to start and try out API’s, making it part of your enterprise automation/orchestration systems should be the goal. For that you’ll want the VCF API swagger file to import into your API Orchestration engine. While this isn’t able to happen straightaway, it’s easy to complete with just a few simple tweaks.

Most platforms today implement a password aging system that requires a user to change the passwords used within a specific interval or have access automatically disabled. VMware is no different. By default, password aging is enabled on most VMware products, including vCenter, NSX, and so on.

In this article, I’ll discuss what can happen when passwords expire within a VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) environment and demonstrate how you can avoid issues.

Part 3: Deploying VCF

In the previous parts of this series, I discussed the architecture of the environment and we went through the configuration of pfSense. Now it’s time to get our SDDC deployed in our home lab, using VLC to drive VMware Cloud Foundation.

Part 2: Configuring pfSense

In the last article, I explained the environment that we would work towards building out. Now that we have the plan down, let’s get started by getting pfSense configured.

Part 1: Defining the Architecture

Building a lab running VCF is made easy through the use of the VCF Lab Constructor (VLC). When run in the ‘automated’ mode, VLC will build out a nested environment and deploy VCF in it. It even abstracts a lot of the networking setup to make it as easy as possible. But what if you want to build out the network manually? In this series of posts, I’ll walk you through doing exactly that!

Yes! It’s possible, I’ve done it.. twice, just to make sure :). At the risk of being redundant @Kyle Gleed was instrumental in driving K8’s in VCF consolidate and has a blog post and paper here, @Tom Stephens posted a great blog on Minimalistic VCF 4.0 deployments with Kubernetes, but I’m lazy and like to make things even easier. That is what I am to cover here, There are a lot of steps, and tons of screenshots making this blog post quite lengthy, my apologies.. I’ll learn to split these up!

No doubt, you’ve heard about the recent release of VMware Cloud Foundation 4.0 and its support for Kubernetes (K8s).  Although you would like to play with the product, the resource requirements seem greater than the resources you have available. Today, I’m going to talk about how you can get a VCF 4.0 environment up and running with the least amount of resources…