In this guide i will go over one of the Locker feature in vRealize Lifecycle Manager specifically the password management.

As a reminder vRSLCM can manage the following:

The first step is to create a new password. We can do so by going to Locker from the welcome screen or the menu on top right

Once in Locker, we can check to see where a specific password might be used. In my case i had just deployed most of the vRealize products and i used in the InstallerPassword reference

Once we clicked on InstallerPassword we can see some details about the password. Click on References to see where the password is used

Next we can go back a level by clicking on password and click add to add a new password to the inventory

Complete the required fields and click add

Now that we have the password created we can go to the Lifecycle Operations service to update the password for the vRealize products. Click on the Menu on the top right and select lifecycle operations

Go to environments and click on view details on the environment where we want to update the password. In my case i will update my vRealize environment

Im going to update my vROPS instance. On the menu under the product select the node on the left side and click on change password towards the right

On the next screen we need to pick the current password for the environment and the new password that were changing to

Lifecycle manager went though and updated the password and its associations

Trying to log in using the root user confirms that the password has been changed

While doing maintenance on my vSAN cluster recently i had the need to disable the vCLS in order to fully shut down the cluster. Doing some reasearch i found kb article 80472 that talk about temporarily disabling the service in order to perform maintenance. The steps are fairly easy

First we need to get the Cluster id from vSphere. To do so all we need to do is select the cluster and look at the url. For example

 https://<fqdn-of-vCenter-server>/ui/app/cluster;nav=h/urn:vmomi:ClusterComputeResource:domain-c8:eef257af-fa50-455a-af7a-6899324fabe6/summary

In the case above all we care about is the 8 number in domain-c8.

Next we need to navigate to the vCenter server -> Configure -> Advanced Settings example:

Click on edit Setting to the right:

Add a new key. Replace the <number> with the number found in the previous step

config.vcls.clusters.domain-c<number>.enabled and value False

It would look like this:

Click on Add and click Save

vCLS monitoring will initiate a clean-up of the VMs and we should notice that all of the vCLS VMs are gone.

After the maintenance is complete dont forget to set the same value to True in order to re enable the HA and DRS services.

In this guide i will go over the steps of getting an existing 8.x vRSLCM appliance upgraded to the latest 8.4 release. The release notes can be found here

The first step is to lo in to vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager under the Lifecycle Operations section

Go to settings -> System Upgrade

Click on Check for Upgrade

We can see that the check found a new version available for 8.4

Click on Upgrade

This will fire up the upgrade process and start upgrading packages. The system will automatically reboot on 8.4 once completed. We can check the version by going to Settings -> System Details

If you get the below error clear the browser cache and try again

I have the need to completely shut down some of my vSAN clusters for various clusters and ive been having a hard time finding the proper procedure. As of 2/16/2021 VMware released guidance here

Here are the steps i took to do it on my end. If you have the vCLS service enabled follow my other instructions here prior to starting the rest of this guide.

Disable cluster member updates from vCenter on each ESXi host in the cluster by running

esxcfg-advcfg -s 1 /VSAN/IgnoreClusterMemberListUpdates

After the above is completed run the below only on 1 of the ESXi hosts. Take note of the host

python /usr/lib/vmware/vsan/bin/reboot_helper.py prepare

Place all ESXi hosts in maintenance mode with NoAction

esxcli system maintenanceMode set -e true -m noAction

Perform the necessary maintenance. Once the hosts are back up we will run the above in reverse

Remove the maintence mode on all ESXi hosts by running

esxcli system maintenanceMode set -e false

Run the below command on the same host it was originally run

python /usr/lib/vmware/vsan/bin/reboot_helper.py recover

vSAN availability can be checked by running

esxcli vsan cluster get

Enable cluster member updates for vCenter

esxcfg-advcfg -s 0 /VSAN/IgnoreClusterMemberListUpdates

I wanted to keep track of what needs to be done prior to actually being able to query API on vRA cloud. Ive been having a hard time finding the documentation i needed in the past

First step is to get an API token for the specific username. We can do this by going to My account under User Settings in vRA Cloud

Go to API Tokens and click on Generate a new api token

Give it a name and select what it will have access to and click on Generate

Once we have the api token generated we can use it to generate an access token by running

curl --location --request POST 'https://console.cloud.vmware.com/csp/gateway/am/api/auth/api-tokens/authorize' --header 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded' --data-urlencode 'refresh_token=api token generated earlier'

Now we can use the output from “access_token”. There`s a number of Cloud Assembly examples here

Full guide available here

If you are like me and you tried to perform an upgrade of vIDM 3.3.x to 3.3.4 you were most likely greeted by no network connectivity after upgrade with the following screen:

If you made a backup of the network configuration this is where we would restore it.

If not we can perform it manually by running

/opt/vmware/share/vami/vami_config_net

Press 6 and go through the screens to configure the ip

Press 2 for default gateway

Press 4 for the DNS

Press 0 to show the current configuration

If you notice in my configuration the dns server didnt take. In order to fix it i recreated the /etc/resolv.conf.

Remove the resolv.conf running

rm -f /etc/resolv.conf

Create a symlink for resolv.conf

ln -s /run/systemd/resolve/resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf

In my case vIDM was still not responding so i had to reboot the server. After the reboot everything started working properly

I wanted to go through the upgrade of vIDM 3.3.4 outside of lifecycle manager. I wanted to do it using the online upgrade via the console. Official documentation can be found here. First step is to log on to the console via the root credentials and upgrade the upgrade manager to 3.3.4

/usr/local/horizon/update/updatemgr.hzn updateinstaller

Set the upgrade version that you are upgrading from in my case was 3.3.2 so i ran

/usr/local/horizon/update/configureupdate.hzn manifest --set-version 3.3.2.0

Because we are switching operating systems to Photon OS 3 we need to download the dual boot update package from here. Look for VMware Identity Manager Service Virtual Appliance Dual Boot Update and transfer it to the vIDM server

And finally run the update

/usr/local/horizon/update/updatemgr.hzn update

Specify the path to the dualboot file. It would look something like this:

If everything went through properly you would be greeted with something like this

All we need to do now is to reboot.

If you are greeted by the following screen follow my other post here