We've discussed Security and Compliance before a few times: Compliance with Aria Operations Aria Operations Custom Benchmarks Manage VMware vSphere Configuration and Compliance with vRealize Operations This blog will focus on the DISA Security Standards Regulatory Benchmark, screenshots here are taken from Operations 8.18.5. Out of the box, none of the Regulatory Benchmarks are activated. To activate them you select ACTIVATE FROM REPOSITORY which will install the Management

Can I integrate VCF Orchestrator with GitHub? Yes, here's how ! In this blog, I will be using my VCF Automation 8.18.1 embedded Orchestrator. Log into VCF Automation and select the Orchestrator tile. Once there go to Administration - Git Repositories and select ADD REPOSITORY. Define the GitHub Repository URL, provide your Username and a Token. To generate the GitHub Repository Token log into GitHub, select your Profile top right and click Settings. Then select Developer S

We have VCF Automation deployed (in this case 8.18.1) and would like to start giving the user OS options upon request. How can we do this? Image Mappings! Log into VCF Automation, go to Service Broker - Infrastructure - Configure - Image Mappings. Click NEW. Give your Image a name, select an Account/Region to pull from, then select the Image to map from the dropdown of Images. This will be the list of Templates as shown in vCenter. I've created 4 Image mappings, one for ea

I'd like to sum Metrics over time in VCF Operations, but Super Metrics don't support time series calculations, so what to do? View Transformations with Intervals, here's how! The use case here is to sum ESXi Host Energy consumption over time, specifically by day. The metric itself looks like this. You'll notice the metric is Total Energy Consumed in the collection period (Wh), by default the collection period is 5m. I created a View against the Host System Object Type usin

VCF Operations 8.18 HF9 recently dropped , which can be applied to any 8.18.x environments. You can apply it directly via the Operations Admin UI or via the Aria Suite Lifecycle Manager. Let's download the PAK file and apply it directly via the Admin UI. Log into the Broadcom support portal and download this PAK File. You can also download the APUAT PAK file and apply it which will run the Upgrade Assessment Test. Let's run it. Log into the Operations Admin, go to Softwar

We've discussed both vCenter and ESXi Host Certificate visibility available in VCF Operations before, but what if you'd like to re-create the list of Certificates provided here. Note: all screenshots here are taken from VCF Operations 8.18.5. Clicking on VIEW CERTIFICATES shows the details. We can export these via the EXPORT to CSV button, but what if we want to see them in a Dashboard. We already have a way to do that for the vCenter TLS/STS/Root Certificates , but what

We're deploying Windows VMs with VCF Automation, but would like to set the Administrator password and enable RDP as part of the deployment process, how can we do this? VM Customization Specifications, let's go! In vCenter (I'm running 8.0.3 in this lab) go to Policies and Profiles - VM Customization Specifications. I've named mine Windows Customization Specification with a Target Guest OS of Windows. I set the Administrator password here. And turned on RDP here along with al

In our last blog we used the VCF Automation Quickstart to guide us through creation of our first Template/Blueprint. I'd like to take that Template/Blueprint and expand on it, first by allowing the user to input a few things. Let's go. If you recall, our original Template/Blueprint looked like this. When published to the Service Broker Catalog it looks like this. I'd like to make this a bit more robust: Allow the user to select Cpu Count up to a maximum and provide a defau

I recently deployed VCF Automation 8.18.1 to test something and I noticed the Quickstart page upon login. I usually just skip this step, but for some reason it caught my eye this time, let's go through it. Click LAUNCH QUICKSTART, which will ask you to configure your Cloud Account: either vCenter or VCF. In my case, I'll just create a vCenter Cloud Account by clicking START on that tile. Provide a vCenter, Username, and Password. Click VALIDATE to confirm connectivity, wh

We introduced the vCommunity Management Pack here . We discussed the second batch of use cases it addresses here . In Part 3 of this series, we will introduce more Content: Dashboards, Views, and Alerts. You can get the latest version of the vCommunity Management Pack here . The first Dashboard we built was for ESXi Hosts, highlighting Advanced System Settings and Packages being captured by the vCommunity Adapter Instance/s. It looks like this. Across the top you have bar

I borked the admin@local password on my VCF Operations Fleet Manager, so had to reset it. Found this KB which got me going. root@vcfops-bpeterson [ /opt/vmware/share/vami ]# ./vami-vlcm-passwd-reset Enter new password: Confirm Password: retrying--- count for get password: 1. Sleeping for 10 seconds retrying--- count for get password: 2. Sleeping for 10 seconds retrying--- count for get password: 3. Sleeping for 10 seconds As you can see, that didn't work. Since I don't ha

In our last blog we introduced the vCommunity Management Pack for VCF Operations. We went into detail around installation, configuration, and the first four use cases ESXi Advanced System Settings, ESXi Software Packages, VM Advanced Parameters, and VM Options. Today we will discuss the next two use cases: Windows Services and Events. If you recall, the vCommunity Management Pack comes with several configuration files, as shown here. The windows_service_list.xml configura

Broadcom Technical Account Manager Onur Yuzseven has been leading the development effort of a Management Pack for VCF Operations called the VCF Operations vCommunity Management Pack . You can find his blog here . The goal here is to augment what comes out of the box with Operations, providing additional Metrics, Properties, Dashboards, and more. It was developed with the Operations Integrations SDK as opposed to the Management Pack Builder . You can get the vCommunity Ma

The VCF Operations API surface exposes metrics, for reference here are a few blogs related to this: Pulling Super Metric Values from the VCF Operations API Pull Cluster Capacity Remaining % via Aria Operations API Pull vSphere World Metrics from the VCF Operations API Today we'll discuss how to capture Datastore metrics, let's go. First, let's authenticate. I'm going to authenticate with local credentials, but there are other ways to do this as well. Once authenticated you

VCF Operations has several Capacity related features, including the ability to reclaim Powered Off VMs and Idle VMs, remove VM Snapshots, and find Orphaned Disks. In product it looks like this (all screenshots in this blog are taken from 9.0.1). You can export the list of Orphaned Disks via EXPORT ALL, but you can also find these in the VCF Operations API. In this case we'll be using the Internal API surface, which you can find here. Top right select Internal APIs and go t

I was recently setting up Log Forwarding in VCF Operations 8.18.3, which looks like this. Documentation for these fields can be found here . One thing to note is that the Host field expects the IP of your external log server, in my case the VCF Operations for Logs Primary Node IP. The other interesting field here is Cluster Name, which is the VCF Operations Cluster Name. If you're ever wondering what your VCF Operations Cluster Name is, you can query the CASA API like this.

If you've been using VCF Operations for a while you've likely come across the Workload Widget in a Dashboard, it looks like this. It will provide the CPU Workload % and Memory Workload % of the Object it's configured to show. Here I've told mine to show CPU and Memory Workload Metrics for Cluster vcfops01 . As shown, beyond that, there is nothing else to configure. If you look at the Cluster itself, you can see the metrics being displayed. As shown, CPU Workload % is at 11.

VCF Operations Fleet Manager 9 is up and running and I'd like to deploy Operations for Networks. Here's how I did it. First, let's download the necessary binaries. Log into VCF Operations, go to Fleet Management - Lifecycle - Binary Management. Select the checkbox for operations-networks and click DOWNLOAD. You'll notice a green check banner indicating your download is in progress. Once downloaded, you'll see them in the INSTALL BINARIES tab. Notice I downloaded the most

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