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Automating the deployment of Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu

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I recently wrote about our Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu solution and how it can really benefit IT Admins, beyond just the App Modernization use case which it was primarily designed for. App Transformer is provided as a Virtual Appliance (OVA) and the deployment using the vSphere UI is very straight forward. In this blog post, we will focus on automating the deployment of the App Transformer OVA.

To demonstrate the automation, I have created two example scripts, one that uses PowerCLI and the other using OVFTool. Both scripts contain the exact same variable names that will need to be updated by customers based on their environment. You can find the description for each variable blow covering both the appliance and application settings.

App Transformer Appliance Settings

  • AT_IP - IP Addres
  • AT_NETMASK - Netmask
  • AT_GATEWAY - Gateway
  • AT_DNS - DNS Server
  • AT_DNS_DOMAIN - DNS Search Domain
  • AT_DNS_SEARCH - DNS Search Path
  • AT_NTP - NTP Server
  • AT_ROOT_PASSWORD - Password for root (requires a minimum of 12 characters)

App Transformer Application Settings:

  • AT_USERNAME - Username to login to App Transformer UI
  • AT_PASSWORD - Password to login to App Transformer UI (requires a minimum of 12 characters)
  • AT_ENCRYPTION_PASSWORD - Password used to encrypt the database
  • AT_INSTALL_EMBEDDED_HARBOR - Install Embedded Harbor registry, useful for proof of concept/testing purposes

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Automating the new VMware Cloud Notification Gateway (NGW) User Notification Preferences

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Last week the VMware Cloud team released one of the highly requested feature which is the ability to control notification preferences for an individual user, which is provided as part of the VMware Cloud Notification Gateway (NGW) service. Users can now login to the VMware Cloud Console (VMC UI) and on left hand side, you should now see a new Notification Preferences tab which will allow you to specify which notifications you wish to receive via the Email channel.


As of writing this blog post, there is currently over 200+ notifications that can be configured which are broken up across the following four categories:

  • Elastic DRS (7)
  • Organization General (128)
  • SDDC Maintenance (61)
  • VMware Site Recovery Service (23)

Today, the notification preferences is configured on a per-use basis and by default, users are automatically subscribed to all notifications. The ability to customize is great but with over 200+ notifications to select or de-select from, this could be a difficult task, especially with a large number of users who may or may not understand each and ever single notification type. This is certainly an area the VMware Cloud team will be looking to enhance in the future to make it even easier to consume and customize.

In the mean time, to help with making this customization change easier within your organization, we can also take advantage of the new NGW Notification Preferences API. What better way to demonstrate this than incorporating this into my VMware Cloud Notification Gateway Community PowerShell Module, which is also available for consumption within the PowerShell Gallery.

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How to programmatically retrieve vCenter Server Patch & Update History?

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After upgrading my homelab to the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 3 release, I was just looking at the "History" tab within the Virtual Machine Management Interface (VAMI), which gives you a historical view of all the patches and updates that have been applied to your vCenter Server since its initial deployment. I am not exactly sure when this was feature was introduced, but it can definitely be useful for both auditing but also debugging/troubleshooting purposes.

Of course, I was curious about this information and wanted to see if I could retrieve it using something like PowerCLI. However when I started to look for the API, I realized that there may not be a public API for this ... but that did not stopped me and taking a look at Chrome Developer, I quickly saw the endpoint which was /rest/appliance/update/history and I was able to figure out a workaround giving the same data.

Below are two examples on accessing this data using either PowerShell or cURL

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