Virtually Jason

I've recently had the opportunity to do some work with a vCloud Director deployment, which has been a lot of fun! We've been working on a lab environment at the moment, and we want the ability to quickly redeploy the lab now and we want to be able to reliably deploy a similar configuration into production later. So, to that end, I spent a bit of time figuring out how to deploy the VCD Appliance via the CLI, and I'm ready to share my results! I started by spending some quality time with the Deploying vCloud Director with the OVF Tool Guide  to get an idea about what options I was going to need. There's a lot of options in there, and there's a moderate amount of variety to their syntax! After looking over the various options, it looks like we can basically break down the option syntax into 3 parts: a Paramter, a Name, and a Value. Various options use these parts in different combinations. Let's look at these lines from their example: --allowAllExtraConfig --d...

I've been working on a vCloud Director environment recently and need to use the API for my current project.  Well, I'm not a big API guy, so this has been a good learning experience for me!  The first hurdle that I had to overcome was authentication, and since I didn't find that to be super well documented, I figure that I should put my notes up here.  So, here's how I get authenticated to vCloud Director's API via PowerShell (because, of course PowerShell!). First things first, you've got to figure out what credentials you want to use.  The most basic way to authenticate is with a local account (rather than an LDAP account), but you need to append a scope to that account name to get logged in.  If the account is part of an Organization, you can use that Organization's name, but if it's a system administrator, you'll need to use "@system" instead. Next, you'll need to Base64/UTF8 encode your credentials in order to pass them success...

vCloud Director is a great tool, but I feel like some people aren’t always using it in the precise way that it was designed.  When you want to perform maintenance on a VM that vCD manages, you’re probably going to have to have that VM powered down.  So, what do you do?  You open your vApp, right click on your VM and select Power Off, right?  Well, I’ve seen a lot of people do just that, but it’s not really what I’d recommend.  Remember, Power Off is not Shutdown; it’s just going to perform a hard power off and your VM might have some issues after that. So, what do you do?  There’s no “Shutdown” option on that Right Click menu in vCD.  Since you want to keep your servers in tip-top shape, you open the VM console and then issue a command inside the guest OS (good ole “shutdown /s” anyone?).  The VM goes down gracefully and you can now manage it… but the vApp might be in an interesting state: “partially running” which can prevent you from changi...