CSE 2.6.1 Error: Default template my_template with revision 0 not found. Unable to start CSE server.

While trying to run my Container Service Extension 2.6.1 after a successful installation. I kept getting the following error when trying to run CSE “Default template my_template with revision 0 not found. Unable to start CSE server.”

To fix this you will need to:

  1. Edit your CSE config.yaml file to include the right name of the default template and revision number. (Much more on this below)
  2. Encrypt your CSE config file again
  3. Re-Run CSE with your encrypted config file

In this post I will explain this in a bit more details for those hitting the same issue, as the resolution is quite simple but might not be as obvious if you are doing this for the first time.

For a start, here is what the exact error look like:

[root@vtcse01 Python-3.7.3]# cse run --config encrypted-config.yaml
Required Python version: = 3.7.3
Installed Python version: 3.7.3 (default, May  4 2020, 15:36:31)
[GCC 8.3.1 20190507 (Red Hat 8.3.1-4)]
Password for config file decryption:
Decrypting 'encrypted-config.yaml'
Validating config file 'encrypted-config.yaml'
Connected to AMQP server (VTAMQP01.vt.com:5672)
InsecureRequestWarning: Unverified HTTPS request is being made. Adding certificate verification is strongly advised.
Connected to vCloud Director (vcd.vt.com:443)
Connected to vCenter Server 'vtvc01' as 'administrator@vsphere.local' (vtvc01.vt.com:None)
Config file 'encrypted-config.yaml' is valid
Loading k8s template definition from catalog
Found K8 template 'ubuntu-16.04_k8-1.15_weave-2.5.2'
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Cloud Director App Launchpad Demo

Cloud Director App Launchpad enables Service Providers to offer a marketplace of applications within VMware Cloud Director. App Launchpad is a free plug-in for VMware Cloud Director that provides a user interface to easily access and launch applications from VMware Cloud Director content catalogs. Using App Launchpad, developers and DevOps engineers can launch applications to VMware Cloud Director in seconds.

 Bitnami supply over 120 pre-packaged Open Source applications that can be pushed to the App Launchpad marketplace in no time. It will allow VMware Cloud Providers to offer over 120 Open Source pre-packaged applications to their customers in no time.  

In this video, I will take you through a full demo of what the end tenant experience with the App Launchpad market place look in Cloud Director 10.1 look like, how to push a Bitnami application to App Launchpad, as well conclude with going through the Cloud Provider interface of the App Launchpad. 

If you are interested in how to deploy Cloud Director App Launchpad to the stage required before you can publish Bitnami applications to it as shown in the video, you can follow my previous post for a step by step instruction on how to deploy Cloud Director App Launchpad at: VMware Cloud Director App Launchpad 1.0Read More

VMware Cloud Architecture Toolkit 5.0 is here!!

Thanks to the great efforts of my colleague Martin Hosken, VMware Cloud Architecture Toolkit (Known as vCAT) is updated to version 5.0. vCAT has always been a great guide to our Cloud Providers on how to best architect/build their Cloud Providers stack. vCAT 5.0 is no exception and include tons valuable information for our Cloud Providers. Highly recommended!

In this new VMware Cloud Provider Platform guide, you will learn how to take full advantage of VMware Cloud Provider Platform, understand how it works and how it can be designed with this comprehensive eBook. You can access vCAT 5.0 for free at the following link: vCAT 5.0 download or by clicking the image of the book cover below.

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VMware Cloud Director App Launchpad 1.0 Step by Step Installation

As the VMware Cloud Director has been evolving and adding features to help cloud providers better serve their customers, and help them target new markets, we are introducing Cloud Director App Launchpad bundled as a free extension with Cloud Director 10.1. App Launchpad will allow the Cloud provider to offer a Curated catalog of applications for vCD tenants, where they can deploy applications at a single click. The end user will be able to deploy these applications without having to understand the infrastructure it hosts it, networking configuration, firewall, Public IP or so on, as all of it will be automated in the back-end.

As VMware had acquired Bitnami (The leader of Packaged Open Source Applications) a bit over a year ago, it makes no surprise to anyone that Bitnami provides over ~130 Open Source Applications ready to serve to end tenants in the Cloud Director App Launchpad. That’s not all, as beyond the Bitnami, Cloud Director App Launchpad support another two sources for applications:

  • ISV apps from VMware Cloud Marketplace
  • In-house apps

This will allow our cloud providers to have a nicely populated catalog from day one as well the freedom to add their own custom offering to it. Before starting on the installation instructions, the below screenshot demonstrate what the marketplace of App Launchpad look like:

You can check out my following post for a nice detailed demo of VMware Cloud Director App Launchpad at: Cloud Director App Launchpad Demo

Now you know how nice it looks like, let’s get started on how to get it up and running.Read More

The VMware Cloud Director appliance deployment fails when you enable the setting to expire the root password upon the first login

As I have been trying to deploy the vCloud Director 10.1 in my home lab, I have faced the below errors, and I wanted to share with others the resolution in case you are facing it and have missed it in the release notes.

“No nodes found in cluster, this likely means PostgreSQL is not running on this node. Consult the management UI from another node where PostgreSQL is running. Otherwise, check /opt/vmware/var/log/vcd/vcd_ova_ui_app.log if you think this is an error.”

The following error in the /opt/vmware/var/log/vcd/vcd_ova_ui_app.log file:

————–/opt/vmware/var/log/vcd/vcd_ova_ui_app.log Start———————

2020-04-19 13:23:52,026 | ERROR | uWSGIWorker1Core0 | ERROR: Command ‘[‘sudo’, ‘-n’, ‘-u’, ‘postgres’, ‘/opt/vmware/appliance/bin/api/replicationClusterStatus.py’]’ returned non-zero exit status 255.

2020-04-19 13:23:52,027 | ERROR | uWSGIWorker1Core0 | Return code: 255

2020-04-19 13:23:52,027 | DEBUG | uWSGIWorker1Core0 | Got cluster status: {}

2020-04-19 13:24:16,968 | DEBUG | uWSGIWorker1Core0 | Appliance is of type primary or standby

2020-04-19 13:24:16,969 | DEBUG | uWSGIWorker1Core0 | getting cluster status: [‘/opt/vmware/appliance/bin/api/replicationClusterStatus.py’]

2020-04-19 13:24:17,098 | ERROR | uWSGIWorker1Core0 | ERROR: Command ‘[‘sudo’, ‘-n’, ‘-u’, ‘postgres’, ‘/opt/vmware/appliance/bin/api/replicationClusterStatus.py’]’ returned non-zero exit status 255.

2020-04-19 13:24:17,099 | ERROR | uWSGIWorker1Core0 | Return code: 255

2020-04-19 13:24:17,099 | DEBUG | uWSGIWorker1Core0 | Got cluster status: {}

———–/opt/vmware/var/log/vcd/vcd_ova_ui_app.log End————————

Usually there is two common names for the above issue with vCloud Director 10.1… Read More

VMware Cloud Director 10.1 is here!

VMware Cloud Director 10.1 has just been released and ready for you to try! As we have got used to in the past few releases of vCloud Director, the amount of features added in each new release is substantial even in minor releases. VMware Cloud Director 10.1 is no different and comes with plenty of features than our Cloud Providers will be thrilled with.

As a start, you might have noticed the name change. vCloud Director has gone under a huge rebranding and is now called VMware Cloud Director, as our Cloud Director Service across the hyperscalers is on its way as well. While some of our documentations might take some time to get updated and where you might still find some old references on the web of it being called vCloud Director, going forward it will be named VMware Cloud Director. Please welcome “VMware Cloud Director”, as it brought a huge amount of features with it.

App Launchpad

Many of our Cloud Providers had often asked about adding applications market place to our Cloud Director Portal in the past. Now with App Launchpad they get a very modern looking market place within the Cloud Director portal, where they can publish applications from different sources including Bitnami Community Catalog VM images, ISV apps, and even in-house developed applications.… Read More

Google Cloud joins Azure and AWS in offering VMware Cloud

VMware had been working hard lately on executing their vision: “Build, Run, Manage, Connect and Protect Any App on Any Cloud on Any Device.”

VMware Cloud everywhere, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google GCP

If you have spoke to any of my colleagues lately or attended VMworld or any other VMware event, I am sure you have heard it or a slightly modified version of it.

Most of you have gotten with VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC on AWS) by now, as it was the first offering of VMware Cloud on hyperscaler. It is the offering of Native VMware stack on a hyperscaler, where the environment gives you the same features and manageability you have used to on-prem in addition to the integration of the hyperscaler services in an environment where you don’t have to worry about maintenance, upgrade, patching, while enjoying all the new features as new releases hit the market.

The idea had appealed to a large number of customer, where thousands of VMC on AWS hosts were spin up over the past couple of years. Microsoft had followed Amazon AWS suit and started offering Azure VMware Solutions lately. I have a feeling that it will pickup quite quickly as both VMware and Microsoft has a strong presence in the enterprise world.… Read More

VMware Cloud Provider Pod 1.5.0.x Update is here

Product Versions Deployed with Cloud Provider Pod had been updated to include vCloud Director 10.0. Below is the full Version changes:


  • VMware ESXi and vCenter Server are updated to 6.7 Update 3
  • VMware NSX for vSphere is updated to 6.4.6
  • VMware vCloud Director is updated to 10
  • VMware vRealize Network Insight is updated to 5.0
  • VMware vRealize Operations Manager is updated to 8.0
  • VMware vRealize Operations Manager Multi-Tenant App is updated to 2.3
  • VMware vRealize Operations Manager for NSX 
  • VMware vRealize Operations Manager – Cloud Pod Management Pack is updated to 3.0

·  You must get a new deployment guide from the Cloud Provider Pod designer and follow the instructions included in it. The instructions are changed, now you must manually upload the products.json in the Cloud Provider Pod appliance to get the new product versions.

·  There is a critical fix in the Drivers and Tools section of the Cloud Provider Pod page to resolve an issue with the download of required deployment software. See the known issues for more details.

As there is plenty of improvements and new features in vCloud Director 10.0, if you were waiting to stand up your setup with CPOD, now you can do it with vCloud Director 10.0… Read More

vCloud Director 10.0 is here!!

VMware vCloud Director 10

For those who were following VMware vCloud Director Evolution lately, it has been developing quite fast and new features have been added continuously at a none matched speed. The development vCloud Director had over the past couple of years just amaze me as has surpassed what was delivered in 6 years development cycle previously.

vCloud Director 10 Evolution over time

vCloud Director 10.0 is here! Below is a summary of what it’s bringing to the table. Tons of great features and enhancement and more to come as we progress.

Modernizing Cloud Operations and Improving Core Efficiency

  • VCD as Central Point of Management: added Admin and Tenant UI, listing of vCenter inventory
  • Events API
  • VCD Appliance: Enhancements in migration, HA, certificate mgmt. These are very important for those who are keen to move to the vCD Appliance which is the direction where vCloud Director is going in the future.
  • VRO Plugin: Enable Multi-tenancy in VRO plugin and VRO cluster support. This will take vCD extensibility to the next level.
  • Enhanced support for VM storage placement with SDRS: added support for intra-SPOD placement; improved support for: inter-SPOD placement, datastore + SPOD hybrid placement, named disks and linked clones’ placement
  • Upgrading the appliance using the default VMware repository
  • Template based deployments, New Template Repository.
Read More

Executing vRealize Orchestrator workflows using Rest API

I have been lately involved in conducting integration between vCloud Director and a Cloud Provider Market Place. The Cloud Provider wanted to use vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) for this integration, as there is different integrations point they wanted to integrate with beyond vCloud Director and they did not want to learn multiple APIs. What is nice about vRO, after you learn it’s API, you can use it to execute workflows against multiple solution using a very similar API calls.

I was able to find them multiple articles on how to invoke vRO workflow from Rest API, but it was not easy to find one that showed my partner the full steps in a simple way, so I am sharing below what I have documented to help my partner with it from scratch.

Alright before we start on the API calls, I have created a simple vRO workflow “AWSNEW” that requires only one input variable “name”. My particular workflow will just deploy an instance to AWS, but in reality the workflow you are calling can be doing anything or talking to any different endpoint that is supported by vRO, and you will still be able to call it the same way.

To call a vRO workflow from Rest API, you will need to know the Workflow ID, and the inputs required. … Read More

‘WIRE’ is a free self-paced learning platform to our Cloud Providers and Aggregation partners

VMware had released VMware WIRE for free to our Cloud Providers and Aggregators. It is a free self-paced learning platform with tons of amazing contents. WIRE offers VMware products and Solutions ennoblement for level (L100) sales level, (L200) Technical, and sometime (L300) Deep Technical. If you have been looking for great VCPP Training materials for your self or your team, here you have it and for free!

VMware Wire VCPP Solution Enablement Learning Path

WIRE is free for everyone to use and doesn’t require a partner central account. You can set up an account in the platform directly – please include all your details so we can put you in the correct team to serve you the correct content.

To use WIRE please login initially via http://bit.ly/SelfPacedWire where you can use a partner central account if you have one, or create one directly in WIRE, (again please remember to fill in all your details!) Once logged in you will be placed into the “VCPP Solution Enablement Learning Path” where you can view all the solution areas and various technologies within.

Watch the orientation course first and change your password so you can log back into WIRE, then save the URL or use http://bit.ly/GetEnabled for future access. If you have any questions on WIRE, you can contact: vcpp_gtm@vmware.com… Read More

VMware vCloud Availability 3.0 Update

The long waited VMware vCloud Availability 3.0 will be released soon, so I thought to share some update about the exciting set of features of what’s coming. If you have been following up the evolution of VMware vCloud Availability, you will find many of your wishes and requests are materializing in vCAv 3.0.

VMware vCloud Availability 3.0 solution introduces a new and simplified product architecture for replication, disaster recovery and migration capabilities into a single product. With the service you can perform:

  • Migration and Disaster Recovery of VMs from on-premise vCenter Server to a vCloud site.
  • Migration of vApps and VMs between two Virtual Data Centers that belong to a single vCloud Director Organization.
  • Replication and recovery of vApps and VMs between vCloud Director sites.

vCloud Availability 3.0 Combined Solution

VMware vCloud Availability (vCAv) 3.0 is combining the features of originally three different products, as shown in the below table. It is replacing all of vCloud Director Extender, vCloud Availability for DR to Cloud, and vCloud Availability for Cloud to Cloud.

vCloud Availability 3.0 Combined Features

 

vCloud Availability 3.0 capabilities:

  • Management and monitoring of replications from on-premise vCenter Server to vCloud Director site.
  • Capability to migrate and failover workloads from on-premise vCenter Server to vCloud Director site.

vCloud Availability 3.0 On-Prem to Cloud

  • Capability to failback recovered workloads from vCloud Director site to on-premise vCenter Server site.
Read More

VMware Cloud Provider Pod 1.1 released

Creative Cloud Provider Pod

Great news, VMware Cloud Provider Pod 1.1 has been released on January 31, 2019. Now the new release include a more recent versions of VMware Cloud Provider stack as below:

  • vSphere 6.7u1
  • vSAN 6.7u1
  • NSX 6.4.4
  • vCloud Director 9.5.0.1
  • vCloud Director Extender 1.1.0.2
  • vRealize Orchestrator 7.5
  • vRealize Operations 7.0, including Multi-Tenant App 2.0
  • VMware vRealize Operations Manager – Cloud Pod Management Pack
  • vRealize Log Insight 4.7
  • vRealize Network Insight 4.0
  • Usage Meter 3.6.1

You can download the VMware Cloud Provider Pod 1.1 at: Download Landing Page

For more information you can check the release notes at: Release Notes,  documentation link at: Documentation and the following blog post: https://blogs.vmware.com/vcloud/2019/01/cloud-provider-pod-1-1-is-out-now.html… Read More

vCD External Networks Creation fail: Gateway cannot be equal to the network definition

I have a Cloud Provider involving me lately, as they kept getting the error below every time they tried to create an External Network in vCloud Director 9.5.

“Gateway cannot be equal to the network definition”

Gateway cannot be equal to the network definition

It was an interesting error message especially in my customer case, where they were confident of providing the right information.  It was a very small mistake that can be easily missed by others. When the above error happened, they were not using the correct Network CIDR. My customer was using 192.168.1.0/24 where he should have been using 192.168.1.1/24. Changing the CIDR to the correct one as below fixed the issue! As it was one of those simple things that others can miss, I thought I will share!

vCD Network CIDR to fix External Network ErrorRead More

vCloud Availability for Cloud-to-Cloud DR 1.5 is here!

The vCloud Availability for Cloud-to-Cloud DR 1.5 has been made available today! 

vCAv C2C 1.5 has come with a number of great enhancements highlighted below:

vCloud Availability C2C 1.5

  • An improved user interface that can be embedded into vCloud Director and allows tenant and service provider users to perform DR operations and monitor DR environments from within vCloud Director.
  • Service providers can enable or disable incoming and outgoing replications for one or multiple vCloud Director organizations in source and destination sites.
  • Policies that allow service provider administrators to limit the following system attributes: a) the number of replications at the vCloud Director organization level, b) the minimum recovery point objective, c) the number of retained snapshots per VM replication, and d) the total number of VM replications.
  • A public API that enables the automation of user session management, vApp replication management and monitoring, as well as system monitoring.
  • A storage consumption report and an enhanced usage metering report.
  • Increased scale and performance.
  • vRealize Orchestrator Integration
  • vRealize Operations Day 2 Monitoring Pack
  • Integration with the VMware Analytics Cloud for the collection of telemetry via the CEIP program.
  • Added support for vCloud Director 9.5

For more information, you can find the release notes at: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vCloud-Availability-for-Cloud-to-Cloud-DR/1.5/rn/VMware-vCloud-Availability-for-Cloud-to-Cloud-DR-15-Release-Notes.html

Product Documentation: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vCloud-Availability-for-Cloud-to-Cloud-DR/index.htmlRead More