Cloud computing and Virtualization

            In April 2024, I embarked on an exciting journey into the world of artificial intelligence (AI), starting with learning Python. Coming from an infrastructure-focused background, diving into AI development felt like a monumental shift. Without prior coding experience, I realized that building AI tools or training models from scratch would require a long-term commitment. However, I was determined to take small, practical steps toward understanding this fascinating field. Exploring cloud AI services from providers like AWS and Azure led me to Azure OpenAI services. This platform showed me how AI could be leveraged to create applications— like chatbots—without deep coding expertise. I was especially intrigued by concepts such as indexing, semantic search, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). These tools enabled me to build my first business use case: a Microsoft Teams chatbot designed to resolve internal queries and reduce dependency on s...

Unlike the previous version the CSE 4.x is a stateless appliance and its data is stored in VMware Cloud Director Database.  The cluster creation and deletion compared with CSE 3.x version has improved. Besides, there are some scenarios where the cluster deletion is failing even when the "Force Delete" option is chosen. We can use vCD API explorer to delete it, the following are the API queries you can execute  Under definedEntity POST /1.0.0/entities/{id}/resolve DELETE /1.0.0/entities/{id}

I have been working in vCD for quite some time, and most of the implementation engineers or consultants faced issues during the deployment or upgrade of RabbitMQ for the vCD message queuing service. From vCD 10.2.2, we can use the built-in MQTT client instead of RabbitMQ however, for VCD multisite configuration or some 3rd party applications need RabbitMQ, such as Veeam or VMware HCX. Using the VCP LCM, we can create a new RabbitMQ environment or manage an existing environment. The reason for this blog is that none of the VMware documentation has the information that registering an existing RMQ instance is only going to work if the RMQ instance was previously deployed by the VCP LCM (or at least, if it is a similar setup based on a Bitnami RMQ VM). Other RMQ instances (e.g., running in CentOS) are not supported and cannot be imported into the VCP LCM 1.5. I hope this information will be useful for someone who is performing green field deployment or upgrading an existing setup. ...

One of the nicest tool available for vCD Life cycle management is VMware Cloud Provider Lifecycle Manager. We were able to successfully upgrade our POC environment from 10.3.3 to 10.4.1.1, which gave us confidence in upgrading the production environment using VCPLCM 1.5. Unfortunately, the upgrade was failing in the production environment and I wanted to share the experience and solution for it.  This tool makes our life easier to do all the prerequisite checks and takes snapshots and take backups of DB before doing the upgrade. It was failing at the stage of "Upgrade_DB" with the below task in VCPLCM. We could see it was timing out with a Postgres IO timeout error in the vCD logs. The logs in VCPLCM and VCD are not very informative and also the upgrade failure results in an automatic rollback to dig further.   ["2023-05-19 13:13:43,812Z"] 2023-05-19 13:13:43,811 - DEBUG - Starting with VCD upgrade. ["2023-05-19 13:13:43,812Z"] 2023-05-19 13:13:43,812 - DE...

This post describes steps to migrate vCloud Director MSSQL database to another server

  vCloud Director upgrade from 9.7.0.4 to 9.7.0.5 It’s a Multi-cell environment (2 cell) hence I am following Orchestrated method for ease of upgrade which is really easy instead of manual upgrade. 

There are different types of network profile available - Existing, Public, Private, Routed and Outbound in vRealize Automation which uses default IP Address Management(IPAM). Apart from these network profiles we can assign a static IP to a blueprint as well.