In this edition of Things My Customers Have Asked Me (TMCHAM), I’m going to delve into some questions around managing VMs running on the VMware-managed VMware Cloud on AWS platform, and talk about vCenter plugins and what that looks like when you move across to VMware Cloud on AWS.
How Can I Access vCenter?
VMware vCenter has been around since Hector was a pup, and the good news is that it can be used to manage your VMware Cloud on AWS environment. It’s accessible via a few different methods, including PowerCLI. If you want to access the HTML5 UI via the cloud console, you’ll need to ensure there’s a firewall rule in place to allow access via your Management gateway – the official documentation is here. If the rule has already been created and you just need to add your IP to the mix, here’s the process.
The first step is to find out your public IP address. I use WhatIsMyIP.com to do this.
In your console, go to Networking & Security -> Inventory -> Groups.
Under Groups, make sure you select Management Groups.
You’ll find a Group that was created that stores the IP information of folks wanting to access vCenter. In this example, we’ve called it “SET Home IP Addresses”.
Click on the vertical ellipsis and click Edit.
Click on the IPs section.
You’ll then see a spot where you can enter your IP address. You can do a single address or enter a range, as shown below.
Click Apply and then click Save to save the rule. Now you should be able to open vCenter.
Can I run RVTools and other scripts on my VMC environment?
Yes, you can run RVTools against your environment. In terms of privilege levels with VMware Cloud on AWS, you get CloudAdmin. The level of access is outlined here. It’s important to understand these privilege levels, because some things will and won’t work as a result of these.
Can I lockdown my VMs using PowerShell?
You will have the ability to set these advanced settings on your VMs in the SDDC, but this is limited to per-VM, rather than on a per-cluster basis. So if you normally ran a script on a pre-VM basis to harden the VM config, you’d need to run that on each VM individually, rather than on a per-cluster level.
What about vCenter plugins?
We don’t have a concept of vCenter plugins in VMware Cloud on AWS, so there are different ways to get the information you’d normally need. vROps, for example, has the ability to look at VMware Cloud on AWS, using either the on-premises version or the cloud version. There’s information on that here, but note that the plugin isn’t supported with VMC vCenter.
What about my Site Recovery Manager plugin? The mechanism for managing this will change depending on whether you’re using SRaaS or VCDR to protect your workloads. There’s some good info on SRaaS here, and some decent VCDR information here. Again, there is no plugin available, but the element managers are available via the cloud console.
What about NSX-V? VMware Cloud on AWS is all NSX-T, and you can access the NSX Manager via the cloud console.
Conclusion
A big part of the reason people like VMware Cloud on AWS is that the management experience doesn’t differ significantly from what you get VMware Cloud Foundation of VMware Validated Designs on-premises. That said, there are a few things that do change when you move to VMware Cloud on AWS. Things like plugins don’t exist, but you can still run many of the scripts you know and love against the platform. Remember, though, it is a fully managed service, so some of the stuff you used to run against your on-premises environment is no longer necessary.
