Virtually Jason

One of my customers wanted to deploy a new vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 environment.  I helped them build JSON answer files and deploy their VCSA 6.0 environment, so they asked me to update them for the new version.  The JSON file format has been updated a bit, so I decided to start fresh from the template to ensure that I had everything that we needed.  Most of it was self-explanatory, except that I ran into a bit of trouble at one point. The template has a section like this, for determining where the appliances are going to be deployed: "VC" : { ... "datacenter" : [ "parent folder", "child folder", "Datacenter" ] ... "target" : [ "parent folder", "child folder", "<ESXi host or DRS cluster>" ] ... } I had a bit of trouble understanding what data to enter into those fields, which was causing my appliance deployments to fail.  Fortunately, the error message was helpf...

I was recently deploying a series of VMware vCenter Server Appliances for a customer who wanted to migrate to that platform from their windows based vCenter 5.5 environment.  Rather than deploying all of these by hand, we figured that this was an excellent time to check out the VCSA command line install options. The first thing that we had to do was to figure out our architecture.  In this case, it was pretty easy.  Each site was getting a vCenter appliance and a PSC appliance.  We decided that we wanted our PSC appliances to replicate with each other, so that we could use the enhanced Linked Mode functionality in vSphere 6, and so designed a ring topology to reduce the impact of a given site being offline. The first thing that we had to do was to prepare some JSON answer files.  To do that, open your vCenter Server Appliance install ISO and browse to vcsa-cli-installer\templates\install and examine the bounty contained within. Copy the example .JSO...

I was working with one of my ProfileUnity customers and they decided that they wanted to change the file server for their user profile repository.  This path gets used in a lot of different places of a configuration.  The easiest way to change it in the GUI is to just create a new configuration (using the wizard) and specify the new file server.  In this case, that wasn’t really an option as they had a very developed configuration with a lot of customized settings that we didn’t want to recreate.  Fortunately, there’s a nice easy work around to make such changes. From the main ProfileUnity page, just download your configuration.  Instead of saving it as an .ini (like you would when transferring it into your domain\netlogin\ProfileUnity folder, export it as a .json file.  This .json file is ultimately just a text file… which means that you can open it up in your text editor of choice and use “find and replace” to great effect. When doing this, bear in mi...