Blog – Page 11 – Adrian Heißler

Customizing the VMware Cloud Director Portal

On August 22, 2022

To match corporate branding standards and to create a fully custom cloud experience, we can customize the VMware Cloud Director Service Provider Admin Portal and the VMware Cloud Director Tenant Portal of each organization. In addition, we can modify and add custom links to the two upper right menus in the VMware Cloud Director portals.

As part of the installation, VMware Cloud Director contains two themes – default and dark. We can create, manage, and apply custom themes. In addition, we can change the portal name, the logo, and the browser icon. In addition, the browser title adopts the portal name that we set.

Configure OSPF in NSX-T

By Adrian

On August 2, 2022

In VMware

In my past blog article on setting up NSX-T, I’ve covered using BGP as the dynamic routing protocol for north-south traffic.
A customer wanted to use OSPF to interconnect their physical networking fabric with NSX-T. Time to play with this setup in the lab 🙂

The logical routing topology which is used in my setup is depicted below:

General vRA troubleshooting

By Adrian

On July 23, 2022

In VMware

The vRealize Automation appliance is installed on Photon OS since verion 8.0. It includes native Kubernetes to host containerized services.The vRA services run as Docker containers in Kubernetes pods. Each Kubernetes pod hosts one or more containers. Examples of vRA containerized services are:

RabbitMQ is the industry-standard message bus used in vRealize Automation.
The vRA database is a PostgreSQL database which runs as a pod and uses a Persistent Volume (PV) to store data.
The vRealize Orchestrator service runs as a pod hosting two key containers, the control center (manages operations of vRO and plugins) and the vco-server (the orchestration engine).

Another basic container concept is a Namespace. Namespaces are a way to divide Kubernetes cluster resources between multiple users.

As you can see, vRA has many components. Of course, they can fail and some knowledge is required to troubleshoot these scenarios.

Repair docker application engine in vRealize Automation 8

By Adrian

On June 5, 2022

In VMware

Recently, services didn’t come back up again on vRA 8.6 single node installation after a power loss in my homelab.

The connection to Kubernetes was refused and failed with the following error while executing kubectl get pods:

The connection to the server vra-k8s.local:6443 was refused - did you specify the right host or port?

I was finally able to fix it using the procedure described in VMware KB article 82378:

Take a snapshot of the vRA VM.
Locate an etcd backup at /data/etcd-backup/ and copy the selected backup to /root
Reset Kubernetes by running vracli cluster leave
Restore the etcd backup in /root by using the /opt/scripts/recover_etcd.sh command.
Example: /opt/scripts/recover_etcd.sh --confirm /root/backup-123456789.db
Extract VA config from etcd with
kubectl get vaconfig -o yaml > /root/vaconfig.yaml
Reset Kubernetes once again using
vracli cluster leave
Run to Install the VA config
kubectl apply -f /root/vaconfig.yaml --force
Run vracli license to confirm that VA config is installed properly.
Run
/opt/scripts/deploy.sh

Shutdown of vSphere with Tanzu, vRealize Suite, VCD

By Adrian

On May 20, 2022

In VMware

We have to shutdown the management components of the VMware homelab in a specific order to keep components operational by maintaining the necessary infrastructure, networking, and management services prior before shutdown.

The order is as follows: