In order to enable product and licensing downloads in lifecycle manager we need to go to Lifecycle Operations

Settings -> My vmware

Add my vmware account. Make sure the account added has a proper entitlement to perform downloads and patches.

With the releases of 8.x and above we now have a password vault that we need to add the passwords to. When presented with the add my VMware Account Detail screen press on Click here to add a new password

Type in the details for your password and press add

Click on Select Credential and add the new password you created, add the username, click validate and then add

After the process is complete the product will automatically start downloading the licensing information from the my vmware portal and it will also allow us to download binaries from the add binaries page

I wanted to keep track of what needs to be done prior to actually being able to query API on vROps 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 vROps 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 -k -X POST "https://console.cloud.vmware.com/csp/gateway/am/api/auth/api-tokens/authorize" -H "accept: application/json" -H "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded" -d "refresh_token=token_generated_earlier"

Now we can use the output from “access_token”. vROps Swagger API can be found here

Here is an example to get the current logged on user

curl -X GET "https://www.mgmt.cloud.vmware.com/vrops-cloud/suite-api/api/auth/currentuser?_no_links=true" -H "accept: application/json" -H "Authorization: CSPToken <access-token>"

Full guide from VMware available here

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 8.4.1.1

Click on Upgrade

This will fire up the upgrade process and start upgrading packages. The system will automatically reboot on 8.4.1.1 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

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