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VCF Recovery Models
Protection & more importantly, recovery of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is something I and Ken Gould have worked closely on for a number of years now. Whether it was a VVD based deployment or in more recent years, a VCF deployment, we have tested, validated & documented the process & procedures you need to follow… — read more
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Auto-Sign Github Desktop Commit Messages
I prefer to use Github Desktop than cli when developing code. What can i say, i’m a UI guy! Our Github organisation requires a Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) on Pull Requests. This essentially means you must sign every commit. It can be easy to forget to do this (and a PITA the remediate that… — read more
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Upgrading VCF 5.2 to 9.0 – Part 9 – Deactivate Enhanced Link Mode (ELM)
The final part of this series on Upgrading VCF 5.2 to 9.0 is to Deactivate Enhanced Link Mode (ELM) on the VCF instance that we have upgraded. ELM has been around forever, but with VCF 9.0, ELM is now deprecated. You can no longer deploy vCenter instances in an ELM ring. VCF 9.0 introduces a… — read more
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Adding an Existing VCF Instance to a VCF 9.0 Fleet
This is a scenario that is not covered very well in our current VCF 9.0 docs (I am working to rectify that), where a customer has more than 1 existing VCF 5.x instance and they want to move to VCF 9.0. The upgrade of the first instance and the addition (or upgrade) of VCF Operations… — read more
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Quick Tip: Retrieve vSphere Supervisor Control Plane SSH Password
SSH access to the Supervisor Control Plane VMs uses an auto-generated password. The password for the system user on these VMs needs to be retrieved from associated vCenter. IMPORTANT: Direct access to the vSphere Supervisor Control Plane VMs should be used with caution and for troubleshooting purposes only. SSH to the vCenter as the root user,… — read more
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Upgrading VCF 5.2 to 9.0 – Part 8 – Deploy VCF Fleet Management Components
VCF 9.0 introduced the concept of VCF fleet, which is defined as: An environment that is managed by a single set of fleet-level management components – VCF Operations & VCF Automation. A VCF fleet contains one or more VCF Instances and may contain one or more standalone vCenter instances, managed by the VCF Operations instance for the fleet. The management domain of… — read more
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Upgrading VCF 5.2 to 9.0 – Part 7 – Upgrade vSphere Cluster
The next step in the upgrade sequence is to upgrade the vSphere cluster to 9.0. Because the cluster is now managed by vLCM images, you need a vLCM image matching the target version you wish to upgrade to. To import the image to SDDC Manager, navigate to Lifecycle Management > Image Management and click Import… — read more
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Upgrading VCF 5.2 to 9.0 – Part 6 – Transition a vSphere Cluster from vSphere Lifecycle Manager Baselines to Images
The next step of the upgrade is to upgrade the vSphere clusters in the workload domain. VCF 9.0 no longer supports vSphere Lifecycle Manager Baselines (aka VUM) as a method of lifecycle managing your clusters. So if you have clusters that are managed using vSphere Lifecycle Manager Baselines, you must transition them to vSphere Lifecycle… — read more
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Upgrading VCF 5.2 to 9.0 – Part 5 – Upgrade vCenter
The next step in the upgrade process is to upgrade vCenter. VCF 9.0 supports what is called Reduced Downtime Upgrade (RDU). RDU deploys a new vCenter appliance and copies the data from the old appliance. This drastically reduces the downtime as it is just a personality switchover that needs to happen after all the data… — read more
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Upgrading VCF 5.2 to 9.0 – Part 4 – Upgrade NSX
Once your upgrade binaries are downloaded, the next step is to upgrade NSX. Once again, navigate to Workload Domains > Management Workload Domain > Updates, and click Run Precheck and ensure all prechecks pass. Once the pre-check passes, click Configure Update. On the Introduction page, click Next. On the NSX Edge Clusters pane, you can… — read more