Removing/updating vCenter Trusted Root Certificates

Last month I had to update the machine certificate of vCenter (SSL). I prepared the new certificate and the certificate chain. In the end, I was able to change the machine certificate but the Trusted Root certificate of the Intermediate CA was not updated and needed to be replaced. However,…

Update VxRail Manager TLS Certificate

The VxRail Manager VM uses its own SSL certificate that eventually will expire. When this happens an alarm will be shown in vCenter: VXR028008 ALARM SSL certificate is within 30 days of expiring. The alarm has a reference to KB 00194212. However, this KB article only tells you to replace…

Cloud Director VM compliancy

If you create a VM in VMware Cloud Director you can choose a compute policy (T-shirt size) and/or placement policy. With a placement policy, you can control where the VM should run. This can be useful for VMs with a specific OS (Windows) where you want to pin them on…

VCF pre-check error installing async patch

On 25th October VMware released a Security Advisory (https://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/VMSA-2023-0023.html) about two vulnerabilities in vCenter. One of them had a CVSS score of 9,8 (out of 10) so it was very important to patch the vCenter servers in the environment. The environment was based on VCF so you cannot just install…

Connecting to Cloud Director using API Token

When you log in to VMware Cloud Director you can use a username and password. But for automation purposes like Terraform, this is not very user-friendly. For this kind of applications, you can use API access tokens. From https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Cloud-Director/10.4/VMware-Cloud-Director-Tenant-Portal-Guide/GUID-A1B3B2FA-7B2C-4EE1-9D1B-188BE703EEDE.html: Starting with VMware Cloud Director 10.3.1, you can generate and issue…

Cloud Director VAMI Setup – NFS Errors

Today we got some complaints from users about slow VMware Cloud Director tasks. It took 40 minutes to create a VM, 10 minutes to power off, and 10 minutes to eject media. Not good! Not good at all! After logging in to the VAMI of the primary cell we noticed…

VCDA – Operation canceled

I was working on setting up a protection from an on-prem vCenter to a cloud site running VMware Cloud Director but whatever I did, I received an error message “Operation canceled due to an unexpected error”. From my point of view, an error is always unexpected, but I wanted to…

VxRail Console Commands

Find missing disks Update disk information Restart VxRail Manager services Change disk serial number on host Restart VxRail platform service on host

VxRail Cluster Health Monitoring disabled

A while ago I had to change a disk in a vSAN disk group and for some reason, the Physical Health view in vCenter showed the information of the old disk. A closer look told me that Health Monitoring was not enabled so I selected the cluster and looked at…