Tag - How-To

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.

As mentioned in this post I needed to download a private GitHub repo as a ZIP file. The GitHub repo containing this blog is now set to private (mainly to protect my backlog of drafts), which broke my AWS Lambda function (see here and here). Minimal changes were required from the functioning code, but there was a lot of testing. Some key changes were: Setting the GitHub Personal Access Token as a Lambda variable Modify the file download function to use custom headers Consuming the token from within Lambda to access and download the file The new function to download the repo:

I don’t like doing things manually. My previous post showing how to replace vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager certificates using the GUI is straight forward, but it’s far too manual. I’m going to show you how to replace the certificate using the vRSLCM 8.1 API(which you can wrap in a script). You can use any tool to interface with the API. I stick to Postman, curl, or if the application provides it, a Swagger UI.

Overview Back in my operational days, my team and I needed ‘pretty’ reports on all VMs in the environment. In almost every case, we needed to include metrics on Guest OS volumes. Back in vRealize Operations 5.x, 6.x and 7.x, I could never find a way report on all instances of a guest volume on many VMs. It always looked like this: Example of a not-so-pretty filesystem report out of vRealize Operations (8.

This post covers the process of replacing a self-signed SSL certificate running on a vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (vRSLCM) 8.1 appliance. I’ll be using the UI to show you how to do it. Pre-requisites Make sure you have a defined a certificate template as per https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2112009 Confirm your user account has the correct privileges to request certificates using Microsoft CA Web Server enrollment. At the least, find someone that can submit and approve it for you.

Avid readers, I bring to you a nice little update to one of my more popular posts on how to deploy a Hugo website from GitHub to S3 using GitHub Webhooks, API Gateway and Lambda. Since that post, AWS has stated that they will deprecate support for Python 2.7 starting 31st December 2020. Not only that, the requests module has been removed from the AWS SDK for Python so the file downloads that happen in my Lambda function stopped working.

Hello again! Today a customer was working with the vRealize Operations 8.0 REST API in Postman and trying to bulk delete “Canceled Alerts”. The documentation in the API states that you need to request a DELETE against the https://{vra-fqdn}/suite-api/api/alerts/bulk API and you should be OK. Well, not exactly. I’ll start this post by assuming that you’ve seen the excellent Postman collection on VMware {code}. This will get you up and running quickly and allow you to login and get an authentication token.

During my time at iseek, a great colleague Angus Kelsey introduced me to a self-hosted budget management application Firefly III. I was impressed with the finish on the product and was happily surprised to find it was open source and could be self-hosted. I’ve got a FreeNAS server running at home for private workloads and wanted to install Firefly III on this server. Can’t be that hard, I thought. A quick search online didn’t find a straight forward article on installing exactly what I needed to get up and running.

Recently I had a customer wanting to identify if a VM of theirs was in Production, Test, or Development based on the VM’s name. Luckily, all of their VMs are named using a naming standard of “{customer}{P|T|D}{application}{server-role}”, giving a generic VM name like “custpdc1” or “cust-t-sql2”. They’re just getting started on their journey with vRealize Orchestrator, and wanted to use it to perform this function. Easy enough, what do we need?

If you followed my previous posts on auto deploying a Hugo site from GitHub to S3 (Part 1, Part 2) you may have noticed that GitHub is deprecating the GitHub Services Integration mechanism. This is critical to the auto deployment function so we’ll need an alternative. To add to my woes, I’ve found that the Node deployment package and all of its dependencies involves more maintenance than it deserves. I also noticed that the original Node package was only adding to the target S3 bucket, not performing a sync or equivalent.