Deployment or Host Commissioning Certificate Error

VCF

During VCF 4.2 deployment I ran into a new error that I hadn’t see previously. Usually I am using VLC and all the pre-reqs have been taken care of for me. However in this instance I needed to deploy VCF in a nested environment under vCloud Director where VLC wouldn’t work. I loaded up my ESXi hosts and configured their IP/DNS/NTP settings, enabled ntp and ssh, and setup their networks and disks etc. Deployed Cloud Builder and populated my deployment spreadsheet. When I got to the validations after submitting my spreadsheet I ran into the following error:

SSL Certificate common name doesn’t match ESXi FQDN.
Continue reading Deployment or Host Commissioning Certificate Error →

VMware Cloud Foundation Security

ESXi, NSX, VCF

Securing a VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) environment can be a daunting task at times. There are several products that can be deployed, and each has specific things that need to be looked at. It’s especially important to think of VCF as a solution though, as actions that you may take on an individual product can impact the functionality of the solution as a whole. Today, however, this just got a bit easier…

Continue reading VMware Cloud Foundation Security →

Removing Failed Edge Cluster

Uncategorized

Sometimes.. things just don’t work right, I am writing another blog entry that required me to deploy an edge cluster and well.. I fat fingered an IP address so there was a failure. While it would be nice to just make a change to the submitted configuration, we can’t in this instance. Rather we need to remove and then redeploy the edge cluster. There is a KB for this, but I like visuals to go along with my text so let’s walk through it together!

Continue reading Removing Failed Edge Cluster →

Building a VCF lab with pfSense (Part 1)

VCF, VLC

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!

Continue reading Building a VCF lab with pfSense (Part 1) →

Changing DNS and NTP with SDDC Manager APIs

Uncategorized
File:Lochstreifen-2.png - Wikimedia Commons

Not so long ago while working at customers, one of the things you didn’t like to hear was that old “data center services” would need to be retired. In my experience, it was usually because they were running an ancient version of FreeBSD or <pick you distro> that wasn’t supported any longer. New services would be stood up, with new IP’s of course.. and then you had to manually change it on every. single. system… The VCF DNS and NTP API’s go a long way to help in these situations!

Continue reading Changing DNS and NTP with SDDC Manager APIs →

VLC/VCF Lab Dedicated Server, best value I’ve seen!

Uncategorized

The other day I was helping a friend of mine get VLC up and running on his server. When doing some discovery about what hardware he had I learned that it was a dedicated server hosted at OVH. I asked how much he paid per month and was quite surprised at the response. As this is something that we constantly run into… HOW much for a lab to run VCF?! I was surprised enough that I went out and got my own!

Continue reading VLC/VCF Lab Dedicated Server, best value I’ve seen! →