VCF.JSON Generator release with content transfer functionality
VCF.JSONGenerator 9.0.0.1009 Release
Introducing the VCF.JSONGenerator PowerShell Module for VMware Cloud Foundation
If you've been about VMware Cloud Foundation at all, you've likely come across the VCF Planning & Preparation workbook developed and maintained by @cliffcahill and myself, dating as far back as 2019. Its been a long time coming, but something that many have asked for is the ability to generate JSON payloads directly from the... Continue Reading →
Nested Labs: Creating Nested ESXi hosts in parallel using kickstart: Part 2
In Part 1 of this post I covered setup of the environment, creating the nested host VMs themselves and configuring kickstart. Basically we did everything in purple in this workflow. In this post I'll cover the last three steps required to get these nested hosts deloyed and prepped for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) bringup or... Continue Reading →
Nested Labs: Creating Nested ESXi hosts in parallel using kickstart: Part 1 (Revised)
Update: I decided to revise this post as despite it showing the kickstart aspect pretty well, I felt it didnt showcase the use of multi-threading as well as it could have. As a more tangible use case for my recent post on reusing functions in multi-threaded PowerShell scripts I thought I'd share some recent work... Continue Reading →
PowerShell Snippet: Reusing Functions in multi-threaded scripts
I had a use case where I wanted to deploy and configure multiple virtual machines in parallel. Each virtual machine required the execution of a number of existing functions to complete the task, and a series of variables to be passed to each function to accomplish that. There is not a lot of good information... Continue Reading →
Nested Labs: Upgrading Nested ESXi Hosts
I use nested hosts for just about all of my testing, whether in my homelab or when kicking the tyres on something in my VMware corporate lab. One thing that used to frustrate me no end was that my VCF ESXi upgrades (especially from ESXi 6.7 to ESXi 7.0) would regularly fail. At first I... Continue Reading →
Lab Automation: Working around issues with New-PSDrive and vimDatastore provider
I've long suffered issues with random failures of the New-PSDrive command in our lab automation when attempting to mount datastores to either query or upload content. For example, running this command New-PSDrive -Location $DatastoreObject -Name DS -PSProvider VimDatastore -Root "\" > $null Will work fine over and over, but occasionally will result in an error... Continue Reading →
Planning & Preparation for Site Protection and Disaster Recovery with VMware Cloud Foundation
Its been a while, but we are finally welcoming the disaster recovery solution back into the family in the form of the Site Protection and Disaster Recovery Validated Solution for VMware Cloud Foundation. It reintroduces Site Recovery Manager and vSphere Replication in combination with NSX-T Federation to allow recovery of SDDC Management components such as... Continue Reading →
Understanding the Planning & Preparation Workbook for VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware Validated Solutions (v4.3)
If you've checked out the Planning & Preparation (P&P) Workbook for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) or VMware Validated Design (VVD) in the past, then you are in for some change with this latest release. We introduced this workbook back in the VCF 4.0/VVD 6.0 days in an attempt to evolve the planning experience from a... Continue Reading →
Introducing VMware Validated Solutions
Wow. Its been a minute since I posted. Thats because we have been furiously beavering away on the evolution of VMware Validated Design (VVD). Those of you familiar with VVD will know that it was an end to end validated cloud stack that included design and detailed implementation steps required to deploy a Software-Defined Data... Continue Reading →
Lab Automation: Unattended Windows Deployments including AD Forests, Domains and SQL server – Part II: Sample JSON and Reading It
Rather than give you all a nose bleed with the 500 lines of JSON input I used in my lab, I thought it might be easier to just show you a sample JSON snippet and some PowerShell code to read it in and various ways to reference it. That way when you see variables in... Continue Reading →
Its been a while…..
So its been a busy couple of months for me - if not for my blog. In that time I've started with the VMware ISBU team working on VVD and VCF, alternating between drinking from the firehose, getting to know the team and figuring out where the bathrooms are 🙂 Personally its really exciting. I'm... Continue Reading →
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