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Automated Lab Deployment Script for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.2

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One of my pet projects that I have been looking into is to easily deploy the required infrastructure, using Nested ESXi of course, to be able to quickly standup a "basic" VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) environment. There are a couple of solutions that currently exists in the community that can help take a user from having no infrastructure to setting up all the components required to standup a complete functional VCF envionmrent, similar to that of a physical VCF deployment. As such, the pre-requisites for using those tools was a bit more than what I was looking for and can also feel overwhelming for a new user. I certainly fell into that category while looking at some of the existing tools.

Ultimately, my use case was slightly different and I also did not need all the bells and whistles such as configuring Application Virtual Networks (VCN) and this also meant that I could dramatically simplify the deployment. For example, instead of deploying the ESXi hosts from scratch, I could simply take advantage of my Nested ESXi Virtual Appliance and use that as a starting point. For those familiar with my various PowerCLI automated lab deployment scripts, I have created a simliar experience for VCF that will deploy a set of Nested ESXi Appliances along with the VMware Cloud Builder appliance, which is then used to deploy VCF on top of the Nested ESXi VMs. To ensure the user experience is as painless and simple, I also use the customer supplied configurations within the script to automagically generate the VCF configuration JSON file that can then be uploaded directly to the Cloud Builder appliance to begin the VCF deployment once the initial infrastructure has been deployed by the automation script.

Note: Although AVN and the respective NSX-T configuration is not in scope for the automation script, it is definitely possible to use a solution like VyOS or pfSense and using techniques like the following to automate the additional infrastructure to enable the ability to deploy a complete VCF environment. I will leave this as as fun and interesting learning exercise for the reader.

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Automated Lab Deployment Script for vSphere with Tanzu using NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB)

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After spending a few days playing with the NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB) APIs, I am happy to share my latest automation lab deployment script for deploying vSphere with Tanzu using the new NSX ALB which was introduced with the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 2 release.

Lab Deployment Automation

You can find the new automation script along with all the details at the following Github Repo: https://github.com/lamw/vsphere-with-tanzu-nsx-advanced-lb-automated-lab-deployment#enable-workload-management


In my environment, it took about ~32 minutes for the deployment to finish, but YMMV based on the performance of your underlying hardware.

Workload Management Automation

In addition to the automated lab deployment script above, I have also updated my community VMware.WorkloadManagement module to add support for enabling Workload Management on a vSphere Cluster using NSX ALB. This is introduced as a new function creatively called New-WorkloadManagement3. You use the Get-Help cmdlet to get a list of supported arguments or you can take a look at this example.

Quick Tip - How to retrieve deleted VM history?

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Here is another question that can be solved by leveraging vCenter Server Events, which provides a lot of useful information, especially for historical operations and auditing purposes. Simliar to identifying where a VM was cloned from use case, we can also use vCenter events to retrieve the historical events for all VM deletions for a given vSphere environment.

One important thing to note is that when a VM or any other vSphere object for that matter that has been deleted, all references to that object is removed from vCenter Server. This means, we can not look for events for a give VM but instead, we need to look at the Task-based Event types to actually retrieve this information.

Putting this together, I have created a PowerCLI function called Get-VmDeleteHistory which can be installed directly from the PowerShell Gallery by running:

Install-Script -Name VmDeleteHistory

After connecting to your vCenter Server using the Connect-VIServer cmdlet, you can then run the Get-VmDeleteHistory function which uses the Get-VIEvent cmdlet and looks at the last 500 events. Below is an example output of what you will see which is the VM that was deleted, the User who performed the action along with the date and time.


If you want to look further back in history, you can provide the optional -MaxSamples parameter and that will allow you to specify the maximum number of events to look through.

Get-VmDeleteHistory -MaxSamples 1000

It is also important to understand that how far back you can go is based on your vCenter Server's Task/Event retention configuration.