Tag - vCloud Director

Roughly 2 weeks ago one of our vCloud Director tenants reported an error when attempting to increase a disk on their VM. They were told to contact their cloud administrator (yay). When we tried to perform the increase, we received an error we’d never seen before: “java.lang.NullPointerException”. Here is what we checked: Confirm the tenant Org vDC has the appropriate resources available (this was an ‘Allocation’ style vDC). Check the status of vCloud to vCenter connection and perform a vCenter Reconnect followed by a Refresh.

I had a few issues getting vCloud Director and SAML federation playing nicely. By issues, I mean there wasn’t an explicit how-to in VMware’s doco. The big issues were group-based authentication and authenticating against a user’s email address instead of their UPN. Using the following article from pablovirtualization I was able to get vCloud Director federated to an ADFS SAML endpoint. https://pablovirtualization.wordpress.com/2015/01/13/vcloud-director-and-microsoft-ad-fs-active-director-federation-service-authentication/ This allowed users to login using their UPN. That’s all well and good until you need users to log into their account using their email address which may differ from their UPN.