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New VMC API to rename SDDC

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A commonly requested feature in VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) is the ability to rename an SDDC. Currently, it is not possible to rename an SDDC after it has been deployed. On Friday, an update was made to the VMC Service to introduce a new VMC API (Tech Preview) that will allow customers to rename their SDDC. The API is just the first step and our UI folks are already working on adding this natively to the VMC UI which I actually got a sneak peak of just a few days ago.

UPDATE (02/11/19) - The ability to rename an SDDC is now also available within the VMC Console UI, so you can use either UI or API to perform this operation.


The new SDDC rename API is very straight forward to use, you simply perform a PATCH operation the specific SDDC /orgs/{orgID}/sddcs/{sddcID} which includes a payload containing the updated name. Below are three ways in which you can easily rename your SDDC, including a UI method for those that want to quickly rename an SDDC and not have to write a single line of code.

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How to retrieve the CSP Refresh Token expiry using the CSP API

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I recently had question from a customer who wanted to automate the retrieval of the expiry for a given Cloud Services Platform (CSP) Refresh Token so that they could monitor it programmatically and setup notifications before the token expires. The CSP Refresh Token is required to interact with solutions within CSP including VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC).

Customers can check the current Refresh Token expiry along with the initiate create and last used time by navigating to "My Account" in the CSP UI and under "API Tokens" as shown in the screenshot below.


To retrieve this programmatically using the CSP REST API, you will need to provide a valid Refresh Token and then perform a POST am/api/auth/api-tokens/details

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Revisiting prompting for user input during an interactive or scripted install of ESXi

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For those that have a need to prompt for additional user input during an installation of ESXi, whether that is an interactive session or using a scripted install (Kickstart) may have noticed the solution posted in my 2015 blog post no longer works with recent releases of ESXi (newer than 6.0).


I was recently contacted by VMTN community cacheman, who authored the original snippet after my 2011 post with an updated solution that would work with newer releases of ESXi (e.g. 6.5 or newer). Thanks to Chris, he discovered the following after taking another look at the initial hack:

It seems that the tty1 techsupport.sh which I had commented out in /etc/inittab is having no effect in these versions and the login prompt is starting on tty1. As far as I can tell this is because for versions >= 6.5, the init process starts before the extras.tgz is unpacked, so it reads the /etc/inittab that comes natively with ESXi rather than the modified one in extras.tgz.

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