My Software Defined DataCenter

VCF on VCD: Upgrading Aria Components

November 8, 2023 ronaldpj Comments 0 Comment

I deployed vRealize Suite LifeCycle Manager earlier (see: https://my-sddc.net/vcf-on-vcd-aria-vrealize-suite-lifecycle-manager/ and https://my-sddc.net/vcf-on-vcd-importing-other-aria-components/) and now want to upgrade them. Since the interoperability between SDDC Manager and Aria Suite LifeCycle Manager is the one I need to look at, it shows me I can upgrade to the latest version currently available, 8.14: But I need to do this in two steps. First upgrade 8.10 to Aria Suite Lifecycle 8.12 and after that, upgrade to 8.14: So I start with downloading the two upgrade…

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VCF on VCD: Importing Other Aria Components

October 27, 2023 ronaldpj Comments 0 Comment

First I deployed Aria Suite LifeCycle Manager (although still called vRealize for that version): https://my-sddc.net/vcf-on-vcd-aria-vrealize-suite-lifecycle-manager/, then I deployed vIDM (https://my-sddc.net/vcf-on-vcd-vmware-identity-manager/), but if I now want to deploy additional components, we don’t get to choose the size, below a certain threshold. For instance, if I want to deploy Aria Automation (vRealize Automation), it’s minimum size is clustered. Aria Operations (vRealize Operations or vROPs) is minimum “Medium”: So I will deploy the Aria Suite products manually and then import them into Aria…

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VCF on VCD: Aria/vRealize Suite LifeCycle Manager

October 26, 2023 ronaldpj Comments 1 comment

After deploying the Edge Clusters on both VCF environments and creating and connecting the T0’s, it’s time to deploy some Aria Suite components. For this I will first be deploying the Aria Suite LifeCycle Manager (or vRealize, as it is still called, because of the version), from within the SDDC Manager. After that is completed, I can use this appliance to deploy and manage the Aria components. This is a split between the two control components SDDC Manager and Aria…

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VCF on VCD: VMware Identity Manager

October 26, 2023 ronaldpj Comments 0 Comment

After deploying Aria Suite LifeCycle Manager (although it was still called vRealize then), we go and deploy VMware Identity Manager (vIDM). For this we have a couple of requirements: First, we have to populate the ASLCM with the correct product. For now, we are just going to download VMware Identity Manager 3.3.7. For this, we go to: (there are more boxes to the right, but for the sake of grabbing the screen, I omitted those). And click on Add binaries:…

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VCF on VCD: Networking Setup

October 23, 2023 ronaldpj Comments 1 comment

Next step in my VCF on VCF journey is building the networking between the two environments. Of course, I have my trusted pfSense appliances that do the routing, but of course, I want to be able to create my own NSX-based virtual network. So the first steps are to create a little design on what I want to accomplish. So in the first phase, I will be creating Edge Node clusters on both VCF WLD’s and configuring BGP between them,…

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VCF on VCD: Replace Hosts in Stretched Cluster

October 23, 2023 ronaldpj Comments 0 Comment

From one of my customers, I got a question on how they can downsize a stretched cluster in a VCF environment. This is basically following the first 5 steps in the “Replace a Failed Host in a Stretched Cluster” article: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Cloud-Foundation/5.0/vcf-admin/GUID-92FD3AEE-5B5F-421C-B722-44AE0314D84E.html So I though, I’d try it out. We need to do the following steps: So, first, we get the Host ID’s. For this we go to the “Developer Center” in the SDDC Manager and click on: API Explorer. There…

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VCF on VCD: vSphere Replication

October 22, 2023 ronaldpj Comments 0 Comment

Because I have had some issues with my lab in the past (having to rebuild it a couple of times) I switched my storage to iSCSI (see https://my-sddc.net/vcf-on-vcd-iscsi-configuration/), but I also wanted to have another means of redundancy and for that I am using vSphere Replication. I will replicate my two VCF instances to each other. The following setup is what I will be aiming for: So the “odd” volumes are Production and the “even” volumes are Replication (I will…

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VCF on VCD: iSCSI Configuration

October 21, 2023 ronaldpj Comments 1 comment

Because my lab has seen a couple of failures, with regards to storage, I got the advice to move my Management VM’s away from the vSAN, since a distributed storage layer on top of a distributed storage layer is not the best option, from a availability perspective. So I have been building a couple of Truenas iSCSI servers, in order to store my VM’s there and at the same time configure some replication, so I am safe from any issues…

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VCF on VCD: Upgrade to VCF 5

June 8, 2023 ronaldpj Comments 0 Comment

Normally I am not that much into “step by step” upgrades of any kind, but since VCF 5 dropped today, I thought, maybe show how incredibly simple upgrading is. So first of all, make sure that you see the version within “Release Versions”: Then we can go and download the necessary components, in “Bundle Management”: There we download all the necessary bundles: Once the bundles have downloaded, we can start the updates. First step is doing a Precheck, to make…

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VCF on VCD – Password expired

May 12, 2023 ronaldpj Comments 0 Comment

Because I created a template and redeployed this template a couple of months later, the password for the root account of the SDDC Manager ánd the root account of the vCenter server had expired. This led to a non-functioning SDDC Manager: And logging showed that there was an issue with a password: Changing the root password for the SDDC Manager wasn’t that big of an issue, just open a console, try to log in as root, and change the password,…

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