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VMware Explore 2024 US short recap

By Adrian

On August 31, 2024

In VMware

VMware Explore 2024 in Las Vegas just finished, so here are the key take aways:

VMware Cloud Foundation 9
VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA
VMware Tanzu Platform 10
Software-Defined Edge Innovations

Watch recordings of sessions I recommend:

General session “Shaping the Future of Cloud and AI Innovation”: https://www.vmware.com/explore/video-library/video/6360758181112
“3 Transformations for the Smarter Way to Cloud”: https://www.vmware.com/explore/video-library/video/6360759075112
“Accelerate Your App Delivery with VMware Tanzu Platform”: https://www.vmware.com/explore/video-library/video/6360758781112
“Private AI and Advanced Services on VCF: What’s Next?”: https://www.vmware.com/explore/video-library/video/6360759174112
“When the Edge Becomes the Mainstream – What’s Next in Software-Defined Edge AI?”: https://www.vmware.com/explore/video-library/video/6360760233112

You can check out the recordings of all the sessions here: https://www.vmware.com/explore/video-library/search

Outlook: VMware Explore 2024 Europe will be held as usual in Barcelona Nov. 4-7.

In the following sections, let’s go a bit more in the details of each of the headlines.

Configure Ansible Open Source integration in Aria Automation

By Adrian

On July 10, 2024

In VMware

Aria Automation supports integration with Ansible Open Source configuration management as well as with Ansible Automation Platform, fomerly Ansible Tower. After configuring an integration, we can add Ansible components to new or existing deployments from the cloud template editor.

This post demonstrates how to setup Ansible Open Source integration and how to use it in a cloud template.

Upgrade VMware Cloud Director to version 10.5

By Adrian

On June 16, 2024

In VMware

The upgrade process of VCD allows two different paths:

Upgrade by using an update package
Upgrade by using the VMware update repository

In this post, we’ll walk though the update using an update package. In particular, we’ll upgrade VCD from version 10.4.2 to 10.5.1.1 in a multi-cell setup. In this setup we have one primary appliance and two standby appliances.

During the upgrade of the VCD appliance deployment, the Cloud Director service stops working and some downtime can be expected. The downtime depends on the time we need to upgrade each VCD appliance and to run the VCD database upgrade script. The number of working cells in the VMware Cloud Director server group reduces until we stop the VCD service on the last VCD appliance. A properly configured load balancer in front of the Cloud Director HTTP endpoints should stop routing traffic to the cells that are stopped.

Configure VMware Cloud Director Failover Mode

By Adrian

On June 9, 2024

In VMware

If you have a production-ready VCD installation, you must create it with a database HA cluster that provides failover capabilities to the VCD database (deployments without database HA are not supported by VMware). The VMware Cloud Director appliance includes an embedded PostgreSQL database. The embedded PostgreSQL database includes the Replication Manager (repmgr) tool suite, which provides a high availability (HA) function to a cluster of PostgreSQL servers. To configure HA for the VCD database in a VCD server group, you configure a database HA cluster by deploying one primary and two standby instances of the VCD appliance.

If the primary database service fails, you can activate VCD to perform an automatic failover to a new primary. The automatic failover eliminates the need for an administrator to initiate the failover action if the primary database service fails to perform its functions for any reason. By default, the failover mode is set to manual.

In this post, I’ll demonstrate how to configure VCD failover mode.

Tasks are slow or stall out in Cloud Director multi cell installation

By Adrian

On May 17, 2024

In VMware

Recently, I was troubleshooting a VCD 10.4 installation with three cells which experienced very slow response times during operations such as Power on/off a VM.

Looking throw the log files soon revealed messages such as:

ERROR | ActiveMQ BrokerService[] Task-15 | TransportConnector | Could not accept connection from tcp://:47990 : javax.net.ssl.SSLHandshakeException: Received fatal alert: certificate_unknown

To resolve this issue, we’ve checked if the certificate is expired by running the following command on one of the cells:

/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/cell-management-tool jms-certificates --status

The following part of the command result shows, that all of the 3 cells didn’t had a valid certificate:

To generate new certificates, we’ve run the command:

/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/cell-management-tool jms-certificates --certgen --force

Afterwards, we restarted all cells:

service vmware-vcd restart

This fixed the issue in this environment.