Quick blog post, there has been known issue in VMware Cloud Foundation 3.5, 3.7 & 3.8 that reports your SDDC manager license key as invalid as the below screenshot shows.
This has been listed in the “known issues” section of the release notes for each version, but there is no KB article for this.
Validation fails on SDDC Manager license.During the bringup process, the validation for the SDDC Manager license fails.
Workaround: Enter a blank license and proceed. You can enter the correct license value later in the process.
In this blog post, I am going to break down a PowerShell code I have created (with help from some colleagues). The functions of this PowerShell code are;
Present a GUI form to the end user
Connect to a vCenter
Select the virtual machine to be cloned
Select the datastore the new VM is to be stored on (display DS free space)
Select the host for this VM to be created against (display free memory on the host)
Set the new VM name
Create an IP reservation in both the Production and DR DHCP Scopes
Below are some functional screenshots of the code’s GUI and also a rough flowchart of what I needed to achieve.
You can skip to the end to find the full code or my github.
TAM Lab Recording
Since posting this blog, I also covered this in a VMware TAM Lab recording which you can watch below.
A little more background on the script
So my customer had a dedicated environment for hosting their custom application, however these applications were built and running inside an old unsupported OS which expected to be running on a particular era of CPU’s to run correctly, for example todays Intel Skylake would cause the OS to panic and not run. As you can also imagine with this type of older OS, there are no VM Tools support either.
Here is the architecture diagram;
Providing DR around this environment was interesting, we could protect the VM using SRM and storage array LUN replication. But this also presented some issues, when the VM boots in DR. “what happens with networking?” hence we setup a DHCP reservation on both Production and DR. Meaning we know the VMs IP regardless of where its booted.
A customer of mine queried the details of a metric available in vROPs “IsGreenForPlacement”
You can find this by selecting a cluster in vROPs, go to All Metrics, and just search placement.
And here is a screenshot of the Metric in a sparkline.
The customer uses this metric to give a signal (Green/Red Button on a vROPs Dashboard) if a vSphere cluster can be used for on-going deployments.
Unfortunately there’s not much documented information publicly. And we ran into an issue where the metric stayed positive (yes you can deploy), but the Storage datastore had run out of space. So I went off to dig out what this metric actually does.
IsGreenForPlacement – details
After speaking to the internal teams on vROPs I found the answer;
“Regarding IsGreenForPlacement metric, only CPU and Memory participates on calculation of this metric, by default if CPU and MEM workload is less than 80% it is green.”
I had an interesting question from a customer recently;
Can we track the adoption/upgrades of VMware tools to the latest version in a vROPs dashboard
At first, I thought sure this is easy. But then looking at the various different default options, nothing would give me a graph which shows the increasing uptake or upgrades of VMware Tools to the last version.
I consulted internally, and between myself and my customer we came up with the following solution. Which was quite simple once we thought it out.
Solution
Create a custom group based on the information you want to capture
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