WilliamLam.com

Using PowerCLI and vSphere Tags to create/migrate HCX Mobility Groups to VMware Cloud SDDC

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If using your voice to create an HCX Mobility Group and initiate a migration to a VMware Cloud SDDC is not your thing, here is a more practical example using PowerCLI which includes HCX cmdlets that was introduced awhile back.


Here are the 12 configurable variables that you will need to update based on your own environment.

$VC_SERVER="vcsa.vmware.corp"
$VC_USERNAME="*protected email*"
$VC_PASSWORD="VMware1!"
$HCX_SERVER="hcx.vmware.corp"

$VSPHERE_TAG_CATEGORY="Cloud"
$VSPHERE_TAG_NAME="VMC"

# vMotion, Bulk, Cold, RAV, OsAssistedMigration
$MIGRATION_TYPE="RAV"

$TARGET_NETWORK_NAME="L2E_HOL-10-f58e483b"
$TARGET_DATASTORE_NAME="WorkloadDatastore"
$TARGET_RESOURCE_POOL_NAME="Compute-ResourcePool"
$TARGET_VM_FOLDER_NAME="Workloads"

$MOBILITY_GROUP_NAME="VMworld-2020-Demo"

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Automating Workload Management on vSphere with Tanzu

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As promised, here is the complimentary solution to my existing Automated vSphere with Tanzu Lab Deployment Script, which will automatically deploy and configure the required infrastructure (vCenter Server Appliance, ESXi, vSAN and HAProxy VMs) so that you can quickly jump to enabling Workload Management on your vSphere Cluster.

FYI: Ben Corrie, one of the Engineers on the vSphere with Tanzu team recently published a vSphere with Tanzu 4-Part Deep Dive video series where he walks you through in deploying everything from scratch along with the concepts that should help you better understand how vSphere with Tanzu works. He is actually doing this in his own personal homelab and thought this might be useful to share with others. Kudos Ben and highly recommend folks check out his video if you new to vSphere with Tanzu and Kubernetes.


Enabling Workload Management is a manual step after the automated deployment script and as you know, I prefer to automate as much as I can. I have updated my existing PowerCLI Workload Management Module to now also support the new vSphere with Tanzu capability using HAProxy for networking instead of NSX-T. The module can be downloaded from PowerShell Gallery by simply running

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Using ESXi-Arm Fling as a lightweight vSphere Automation environment for PowerCLI and Terraform

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A set of use cases that I was really excited for when I first heard about ESXi-Arm a few years ago was around the topic of vSphere Automation and Development. I speak with many customers who are just starting out on their Automation journey whether that is using PowerCLI, one of our many vSphere Automation SDK or even directly to the new vCenter REST API which all new features are being exposed through these days.

One of the biggest challenge for new comers is simply getting access to hardware that they can start playing around with and although there are is plethora of vSphere Homelab choices, it does require some amount of investment, which is definitely worth it in the long run. However, if you are just getting started and maybe you want something that is a bit more lighter weight, there are not too many options outside of an Intel NUC. I know many consultants actually carry around an Intel NUC that contains several VM images that they use to with their clients, including demos.

With the small form factor, low cost and reduced power consumption of the Raspberry Pi, I think this really opens up the door for some interesting creative solutions:

  • Basic vSphere footprint that can be used for work or learning purposes
  • Easy way to learn and explore the vSphere API with an actual host and enabling real VM deployments
  • Trying out Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform and Ansible
  • Quick way to run through basic demos in front of customers
  • On-demand and self-contained lab environment for small Hackathon at your local VMUG or even at VMworld

Something I was really interested in early on was to be able to use ESXi-Arm with the Raspberry Pi to not only have a basic ESXi environment but also have PowerCLI environment up and running in an Arm VM. My first thought was to get this setup using Photon OS, which not only has Arm distribution but also has support for Powershell and PowerCLI. I was hoping with some tinkering, I could easily get Powershell for Arm to run on PhotonOS (which it did) but I then ran into issues installing PowerCLI itself.

I decided to give up for now and take a look at Ubuntu which also supports Powershell for Arm, but the Microsoft documentation only listed instructions for 32-bit and ESXi-Arm requires a 64-bit. Taking a look at the Powershell release files, I noticed there was 64-bit package and with a few minor adjustments to the commands, I got PowerCLI installed and connected back to my rPI which was attached to my x86 vCenter Server!

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