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Synopsis

Our configuration at the start of this process is vCloud Director 9.5 installed and successfully running on CentOS7 VM using an external MS SQL database. By the end of this process we will be running Cloud Director on the self-contained appliance with a single external NFS share. I highly advise you create a cloned environment and run through these steps to ensure they work correctly in your environment as this is a highly complex process. If you run multiple cells then I suggest you perform this work on a single cell, upgrading it to the very end, remove all additional cells and simply deploy new cells once the primary is successfully working. This method assumes isolation from direct access to download updates, due to this the article is written around creating ISOs, mounting CDs, etc. With Cloud Director 10 the old flex UI has been completely deprecated. There are many new items in Cloud Director 10.1 which I have summarized in my article [vCloud Director 10.1 Release].

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Synopsis

vCloud Director 10.1 (VCD) has recently been released from VMware, with this release comes some great new features and enhancements. Many of these are items that will greatly enhance our abilities as VCD administrators and allow our tenants through the UI to have a much easier time managing vApps and VMs, including Kubernetes (K8s) clusters, and get much needed features available like VM and disk encryption. Here are a few highlights from the release documents that are going to be major impact for my team.

Please note that as of right now VCD 10.1 does not support vSphere 7.0 or NSX-T 3.0. There will soon be a minor patch that will update VCD in order to allow that functionality.

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Synopsis

VMware Skyline is a new product currently for premier partners. The product is installed as an appliance within an existing vCenter environment and can be tied into vCenter, NSX, Horizons, and vRealize Operations. It proactively examines the environments that it is tied into and reviews the configuration giving you detailed inventory views. These views have a couple of primary benefits, the first is the proactive findings tab which will give you detailed issues within your environment. These findings can include misconfigured devices, vulnerabilities, and missing settings, along other possible issues. The second major benefit is the ability to quickly send bundle logs to VMware. When you are working on an SR the engineer at VMware will send a request through the Skyline product, you simply have to approve the bundle and it will perform the function for you! That means no more manually pulling the bundles and uploading them to VMware’s website, this is a major time saver.

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Synopsis

Replacing the SSL certificate inside a VMware Cloud Director V9.X (VCD) installation can be difficult. In this article I break down the procedure into easy to follow steps.

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Synopsis

This is a very long and detail guide on upgrading multiple aspects of a VMware installation including VMware vCenter 6.7, VMware Cloud Director (VCD), and NSX for vSphere (NSX-v). I did not break this up into different processes because each one was so dependent upon the other, so all of this was done in a single massive maintenance window.

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