Eric Sloof

Terraform is a well-known and widely used tool to manage infrastructure as code. As a tool that’s extremely simple to use and requires minimal code experience, Terraform supports developers and organizations in streamlining cloud infrastructure management without changing their cloud providers or resources – only slight shifts in their infrastructure management workflow.

Understand the underlying concepts of Terraform, declarative cloud infrastructure management, and key basics of Terraform’s language, the Hashicorp Configuration Language.

• What is Infrastructure as Code?
• Why Terraform?
• What is Terraform?
• Getting Started with HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL)
• Using Terraform to Provision Linode Environments
• Linode Kubernetes Engine and Terraform
• Importing Existing Infrastructure to Terraform
• Other Infrastructure as Code Tools and Integrations

Download: Declarative Cloud Infrastructure Management with Terraform

During the preparations for an upcoming training course delivery, I ran into some issues while adding a vCloud Director Instance to vRealize Orchestrator. The vCloud Director plugin offers a workflow to add a connection. After providing the host settings and authentication information the workflow throws the following error. 

Error in logging in with user admin to the vCloud host https://sa-vcd-01.vclass.local:443 (Dynamic Script Module name : addHost#18)

The certificates in the lab-kit were updated recently so I first had to make sure the most recent vCloud Director certificate was uploaded to the vRealize Orchestrator appliance. You can do this by running a workflow called import a certificate from URL. Simply specify the URL, in my case https://sa-vcd-01.vclass.local:443 and the option to ignore warnings when using a self-signed certificate.

I gave it another try, but the add a connection workflow still throws the same addHost#18 error.

vRealize orchestrator certificates are managed in the Control Center. The Control Center is available at https://sa-vro-01.vclass.local:8283/vco-controlcenter/config. After selecting certificates, I noticed 3 certificates. One for vCenter and two for vCloud Director. One of the vCD certificates was expired but still on the top of the list. After removing the expired certificate, I was able to add the vCloud Director instance to vRO.

But this is only half the story. In vCloud Director, the vRealize Orchestrator must also be configured as an endpoint for publishing and using workflows in the service library. This can be done by logging into the provider portal and then going to the content libraries. 

This is where you will find service management in the library administration. On the vRO Server tab you can ADD a vRealize Orchestrator instance after specifying the hostname and username. 

You also need to upload the Trust Anchor. This is the PEM certificate of the vRealize Orchestrator. Retrieving this certificate is possible by using the command line keytool with the keystore password at the vRealize Orchestrator appliance. This procedure is described in this blog article written by Yves Sandfort over at Comdivision. Grab a copy of the PEM certificate with WinSCP from the vRealize Orchstrator appliance and upload the certificate to vCloud Director.

If you try to kick-off workflow from vCloud Director and it still doesn’t show the inventories, make sure that vCenter is also configured correctly as an endpoint in vRealize Orchestrator. The vCenter plugin offers 3 workflows for adding, updating, and deleting a vCenter instance.

In this video I’ll show you how to export a self-signed certificate from vCloud Director and import this certificate into the trusted root certification authorities store. Don't forget to trust the console proxy certificate on port 8443. Visit for example: https://vcd.ntpro.local:8443 and repeat the steps from in the video. Otherwise, your web console will acquire a valid MKS token but the console shows disconnected with a retry link.

Imager provides a FULLY automated and elegantly simple way to build clean Windows 10 VMs from scratch in one seamless flow. Provide Imager with the preferred Windows installation media ISO and it will do all the hard work producing a fully provisioned VM or sysprepped golden image. Use the image within your Horizon desktop pool, for personal use or other any desktop infrastructure needs.

Imager takes care of creating the VM, silently installing and updating the OS, installing applications and agents, sysprepping and finalizing the image for distribution. There is also a powerful "Continue" feature that allows you to stop the flow at a particular stage, do some manual operations or optimizations on the VM, before running the remaining stages.

The key advantages over traditional manual imaging process is greatly increased productivity, less reliance on specific expertise, and avoiding the bloat associated with continuing to add customizations onto the same image. The advantage over similar automation products is simplicity. Imager is quick to setup and easy to use, taking care of the complexities specific to imaging Windows 10 without relying on setting up configuration files and scripts with special customizations.