d-fens GmbH
Audit and Consulting of Information Systems and Business Processes
vCAC 5.2 Hotfix 5 is available. This hotfix addresses a lot of issues that were unfortunately introduced with hotfix 4. So it might be a good invest testing it to see if things are gone… A backup of your infrastructure prior installing it is highly recommended as a restore is not really possible. So you best test it thoroughly in […]
When using the static IP service in vCAC 5.2 you might come to a suprise after you installed vCAC 5.2 Hotfix 4 (HF4), because – it no longer works… VMware Support is informed about this and will fix it in HF5. Until then you either do not use this feature any more or use a workaround to “manually” assign the […]
When working with the vCAC MgmtContext from within PowerShell or whatever other .NET language you will probably have noticed two properies on the context called ‘Entities’ and ‘Links’. Whenever you make a call like ‘$vm = m.VirtualMachines |? VirtualMachineName -eq “server1″‘ the DataContext is tracking the queries objects and thus adding them to the two aforementioned properties (that are actually […]
Often you would like to customise one or two things with a script in one of the predefined workflow steps like ‘BuildingMachine’. However depending on your blueprint you do not […]
Imagine you feel like reinstalling your vCAC system as the DB got somehow corrupted and VMware support is not able to fix it. Although you really like the fancy GUI of the vCAC administration interface you somehow get bored to enter all your configuration options again and again … As usual, there is help: You can later import them via […]
Sometimes you want to have the user to be able to select a VLAN based on the location he chooses during a machine request. With some little logic you can actually create a DropDown box backed by a ValueExpression that lists all selected networks per location. You only have to enumerate all HostReservations, lookup the location of its related Compute […]
As an update to the previous post on doing a manual placement of VMs I would like to present a approach for a placement strategy in vCAC that is a […]
Did you ever want to quickly enumerate over all vCenters that are connected with vCAC? without storing hard coded credentials? and never worry when endpoints are added or removed? Here is how …
In vCAC you can set a location on a ‘Compute Resource’. While in some cases this might not make sense (e.g. vCenter stretched clusters) you might still want to use it, for example to implement some placement logic. When you have a look at the object, you might be surprised to see, that there is no attribute of the corresponding […]
[UPDATE 2014-02-16] For a different approach on how to change HostReservation and StorageReservation have a look at the method via RegisterExistingVirtualMachine().] One of the limitations in vCAC 5.2 is the […]
Warning: this post describes a feature where the developers probably might not have thought of when they designed it. Use on your own risk (as with any scripts we show you here). When using workflows to integrate with infrastructure outside the control of vCAC (like getting the next available IP address from your IPAM system) you might run into concurrency […]
You have read all the blogs like Calling Powershell/PowerCLI Scripts from a vCAC workflow on how to call PowerShell scripts from vCAC or -if you really have to- vCO (when […]
vCAC has the a built-in feature to define properties as drop down lists that can display information based on a selection of a different (parent) property (as described in the vCAC 5.2 Operating Guide). This is called a “ValueExpression”. Though this mechanism is a bit buggy and might even raise some security issues it is still quite useful in certain […]
When you use vCAC with a CNAME and want to access the website /vCAC from the server itself you might actually notice that you can only access the website via “localhost” instead of the CNAME. This is actually a security feature of the Microsoft Internet Information Server that you can re-configure to adjust this behaviour. Just follow the artile You […]
During long running provisionings you may want to inform the user about the states you are currently processing. In my previous blog post I showed how to add a text to the ‘CurrentTask’. But maybe you want to give the user a little bit more information where the status field does not provide enough space. Especially in case of a […]
When you provision a machine in vCAC you will probably integrate with other systems in your infrastructure like IPAM, AD, ITSM and the like. Sometimes this ia a lengthly process. […]
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