During some recent lab work, I deployed a fresh vRealize SaltStack Config 8.8 appliance in my lab and had it integrated with vRA and vIDM. On first login I found that my vIDM/vRA administrator (config admin) was unable to see the minions in SaltStack Config UI. After some trial and error and working with some others internally, I found the issue was related to the default permissions provided by the vRA IAM integration.

Cloud-Init and Hostnames First problem was Ubuntu 20.04 to properly boot from the Packer HTTP directory. I found approximately 3,125,319 blogs online all with different Ubuntu boot commands. I settled on this: boot_command = [ "c", "linux /casper/vmlinuz --- autoinstall ds=\"nocloud-net;seedfrom=http://{{.HTTPIP}}:{{.HTTPPort}}/\"", "<enter><wait>", "initrd /casper/initrd", "<enter><wait>", "boot<enter>" ] Next up was a working user-data file for the boot customisation process. I settled on a mish-mash of different examples found online: #cloud-config autoinstall: version: 1 early-commands: # Stop ssh for packer - sudo systemctl stop ssh locale: en_US keyboard: layout: en variant: us # general packages needed for machines - referenced from https://tekanaid.

In February 2022, I reached an incredible milestone: 3 years as a VMware Technical Account Manager (TAM). I’m writing about my experiences from the first 3 months to the first 12 months and on. I hope my experiences can highlight what this role is about to any would-be TAMs reading. First Three Months The first three months of any job are difficult. You are (kind of) expected to: learn everyone’s names in your branch and team, your teams structure, how you fit within the overall business, get a grip on what your job actually is vs.

A breakdown of each test objective and links to reference materials.

Quick post today! While deploying a vRealize Log Insight (vRLI) cluster with a VIP using vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.1, you receive this error: Error Code: LCMVRLICONFIG40091 Error occured while configuring vRLI Integrated Load balancer. {"errorMessage":"Specified IP address is not available. It is already held by another host in the network","errorCode":"LOAD_BALANCER_ERROR","errorDetails":{"errorCode":"com.vmware.loginsight.api.errors.loadbalancer.ip_address_unavailable"}} This is clearly due to an issue with the VIP that has been configured. Check both forward and reverse DNS records of course.

A breakdown of each test objective and links to reference materials.

You might notice something a little different if you’ve visited the site today. That’s right, a new theme based off VMware’s ClarityUI that’s in use across almost all of our products. I was envious of Cody De Arkland’s The Humble Lab blog and his work to integrate Clarity to his blog. Once I saw it, I knew that I wanted to do something similar but with my own touch and give myself a chance to dig deeper into Hugo.

A few weeks ago, a customer of mine was attempting an embedded vCenter upgrade from 6.7U3 to 7.0. Stage 1’s deployment of a new vCenter appliance was successful, however Stage 2 (on the new appliance) was failing while attempting to perform a pre-check. We checked the requirements-upgrade-runner.log file and found an error, but it’s quite vague: lookup.fault.EntryNotFoundFault. We worked together and checked the following: SSO admin password contained only supported characters.

TL;DR - the vSAN HCL Database update from vCenter requires port 80 outbound to http://partnerweb.vmware.com/service/vsan/all.json. A little while ago, a customer of mine, in a restricted environment, was having issues getting the vSAN HCL Database updated in vCenter. Following https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2109870 didn’t address the issue, but allowed them to update the DB manually. Outbound HTTPS traffic to partnerweb.vmware.com was whitelisted on the proxy, and 443 allowed on the firewall. Testing DNS and ports using curl showed that everything should be working, but we still couldn’t update the HCL DB.

Following along the theme of one of my previous posts on vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (vRSLCM) and its REST API, here’s another on replacing the password for a vCenter Server in a vRSLCM “Datacenter”. Similar to my previous post, we’ll be doing this in the Swagger UI as the ability to replace the password is not available in the standard vRSLCM UI (v8.1). The APIs used in this post are private and, as such, not supported by VMware.