New Lab – My Software Defined DataCenter

Nutanix CE with AOS and Prism Central 7.5 (but older version of AHV)

January 22, 2026 ronaldpj Comments 0 Comment

At the moment of writing this, Nutanix CE is available for deployment, with AOS 6.8.1 and the corresponding AHV (don’t know the exact version, but it is somewhere in the vicinity of AHV-20230302.101026. When you deploy this, you can upgrade, through to the 7.0 branch, with AHV 10.0, but if you want to go further than that, you run into issues when you run on a nested environment, as I do. There is no supported method to upgrade AHV beyond…

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VCF on VCD: Importing Other Aria Components

October 27, 2023 ronaldpj Comments 1 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 2 comments

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 1 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: 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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VCF on VCD: 4a – Stretched Clustering

January 8, 2023 ronaldpj Comments 0 Comment

I shortened the name of the blog-series, to make it a little easier on the eyes. I mentioned in my previous blog that I was going to build another VCF instance and make that a stretched cluster. However, I thought, technically it should be possible to change the already built VCF02 environment to that. The only thing that I need to do is change the IP-assignment on the NSX-TEP’s. Please note, this is nót (I repeat NOT) a supported method!…

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VCF on VCD: 3b – Second VCF environment – Management Domain+WLD+Housekeeping

January 7, 2023 ronaldpj Comments 0 Comment

When I have a new purpose in my mind, I want to move forward. So after preparing the infrastructure, I moved ahead with deploying the Management Domain, the Workload Domain and some housekeeping tasks (like backups and certificates). Most of this I have already documented in earlier blogs, but this blog will mention some differences and also show the ultimate goal (in a nice picture). The target environment is: I changed the IP addresses and the VLAN’s of the components…

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