vTAM – virtual Technology Addicted Men

15 November 2024

VCSA file-based backup troubleshooting

In this short blog I will try to describe how to troubleshoot a VCSA-backup issue with the aim to understand the inner working of the VCSA BackupManager. While KB316609 describes most common VCSA backup issues, my customer encountered one that was not to be found on this list. Instead they observed the following three behaviors: And third, no updates whatsoever...

vCenter/VCF/vSphere Comments: 0

11 April 2024

NSX – New Compute Manager – FQDNs are not configured!

During my latest VCF lab deployment I encountered an issue that was not easily found both internally and external. Therefor I needed to troubleshoot the issue in detail which resulted in a working environment and now known root-causes My homelab is old and started it’s life in the Windows 2012R2 era. This means I still use the DNS-services from that...

NSX/Photon/VCF Comments: 2

30 March 2024

Send Aria Operations Alerts to MS Teams via Webhook Notification Plugin

Recently I was looking at different options to send alerts from Aria Operations to another system like SMS, Signal, Slack and MS Teams. Sending Alerts to SMS did not seem very secure and requires a gateway (or 3rd party service). Signal was lacking APIs and a bit to complex. Slack works great but was not an option at this time,...

Aria/Aria Operations/vROPS

21 March 2024

Aria Automation Rebuild VMs – images

As you may all know, Aria Automation 8.12 incorporated a new Rebuild day-2 feature with the aim to support re-provisioning of vSphere machines while keeping basic configurations in tact. Under the hood this rebuild action deletes the VM and then re-creates the VM while maintaining all of it’s properties. At that moment in time the feature was only available for...

Aria Automation/Automation/Orchestrator/vRA Comments: 0

15 March 2024

Create a user in the VIDM System Directory

While running into some issues with Aria Automation I needed to create a new testuser. Since it was not possible at that time to create an Active Directory account, I decided to create a local account in the VIDM System Directory. Sidenote: depending on where you are in the UI or documentation the product may be called VIDM, VMware Identity...

Access/Powershell/VIDM/vRA

14 January 2024

Unattended ESXi deployment with Go-Via

Recently I was looking for new way to deploy nested ESXi servers. Of course you can use the Nested ESXi OVA’s, but in some cases, I prefer to have more flexibility (or maybe it’s just for fun, exploring different options). I have manually setup a PXE and TFTP server, but this is not the most user-friendly way of doing things....

ESXi/vSphere Comments: 0

17 November 2023

Add Cloud Account in Aria Automation using API

Since I am deploying new releases of Aria Automation often, I wanted to automate the configuration as much as possible with the tool of my choice Powershell. One of the first things you want to configure after you have deployed Aria Automation is a Cloud Account and a Cloud Zone; in my case a vSphere Cloud Account. From the API...

Aria Automation/Automation/Powershell/vRA

16 November 2023

Generate an Access- and Bearer Token for Aria Automation API Authentication

For automating things in Aria Automation, my preferred method is PowerShell calling the API’s. I’ve been using this method for quite some time as you may have seen in my previous blogposts. Although VMware KB89129 describes the process to retrieve the Access Token, I noticed some people are still struggling to get started, hence I’ll share and explain this specific...

Automation/Powershell/vRA

3 April 2023

vRA8 Roles, Permissions & Policies

With this post I would like to inform you on the way we Roles, Permissions and Policies [RRP] are designed within vRA8. While working with customers I realized there was some confusion and different expectations on how this was implemented. With help of some slides I would like to make it clearer and more consumable. Let’s start with an overview!...

vRA

28 March 2023

Generate and replace Log Insight Certificates

Introduction This blogpost is about various options and corresponding tasks to generate and replace vRealize Log Insight (aka Aria Operations for Logs) certificates. Experience and instructions in this blog are based on a standard vSphere Environment (no VCF, no NSX-T): vCenter 7.0u3k, vRealize Lifecycle Manager (vRSLCM) 8.10 Product Support Pack 8, vRealize Log Insight (vRLI) 8.10.2. My vRLI environment consists...

vRLI/vRSLCM