Category Archives: VMware

Start and stop scripts for VCF 4.x home lab with VLC.
In one of my previous blog posts, I showed you how to build your own VCF 4.0.1 home lab with VLC. I would like to share my start and stop scripts for a VCF home lab with the VMware community. Starting and stopping my VCF home lab was always a manual task and took a…

Cloud Director cells 10.1 and later failover methods.
HA support for the Cloud Director nodes were introduced in version 9.7 and has been improved in the 10.1 release. In Cloud Director 9.7 the only failover method was manual. So in case of a failed primary database node, the failover need to be manually initiated from the web console: https://vcloud.domainname.com:5480 That all changed in…

My presentation at vMA/vNSTechcon 2020
vNSTechCon is a dutch VMware event that take place once per year in the Netherlands. The event is based on two tracks: vMA (Management & Automation) and vNS (Network & Security). The setup of the event was this year a little bit different. Because of the current virus outbreak (Covid-19) the event took place online….

Deploy VCF 4.0.1 with BGP loopback addresses
For a customer project I needed to deploy VCF 4.0.1 with BGP loopback addresses on a Cisco Fabric (spine leaf setup). As you may already know VCF requires BGP configurations to configure BGP peerings in NSX-T. The VCF design we have is a little different from the blueprint (VVD 6.0.1). Instead of having the BGP…

Configure a NSX-T overlay network on a Windows 2016 bare metal server.
In this article, I will show you how to prepare your Windows 2016 bare metal server to be configured as an transport node in NSX-T and how to configure a NSX-T overlay segment on a Windows 2016 server bare metal server. By configuring your bare metal server as a transport node, you will be able…

Build your own VCF 4.0.1 test lab with VLC.
VCF Lab Constructor also known as VLC, is a tool that can automate the deployment of a nested VCF lab. VLC will deploy a VCF environment with minimal resources. A single physical server with 12 cores, 128GB RAM and 800GB SSD is needed to deploy a VCF lab. Using SAS disks instead of SSD disks…

What is an vExpert and how to become one?
vExpert, you might have seen it before on social media or on VMware communities but what is it? In this blog post, I will share my experience of becoming an vExpert, what the benefits are and most important part is how you can become an vExpert yourself. What is the vExpert program all about? The…

Unable to eject/cancel VMtools ISO in vCloud Director 9.7
During a maintenance on of the hosts I manage, I discovered that the host was unable to go into maintenance mode because of an mounted VMtools ISO. I was unable to easily unmount the VMtools ISO from the virtual machine. In this article, I will show you how to troubleshoot and eventually how to fix…

Unable to change VM config in vCloud Director 9.7 error: “class: java.lang.NullPointerException”
The following error message was shown in the vCloud director GUI after trying to modify the VM: “class: java.lang.NullPointerException”. The issue occurred on every VM configuration update such as: edit description, changing resources etc. Troubleshooting on vCD layer I tried to find some additional logs by logging into the vCD cells and searching for the…

No DNS resolution after successful deployment of vCAv 3.5.1 appliance.
For the preparation of a migration, I needed to deploy a vCAv 3.5.1 appliance on the source site. The migration was going to be from vCD 9.5 to vCD 9.7 platform. During the initial setup of the vCav appliance, I ran into an issue when configuring the lookup service. The error message I got was:…