[VMC] Programmatically finding if a specific vCenter is hosted in a VMC on AWS SDDC

Products

• VMware Cloud on AWS

Issue/Introduction

Guide on how to find out whether or not a specific vCenter is hosted in a VMC on AWS SDDC programmatically.

Environment

VMC on AWS

Resolution

• Due to the way VMC on AWS SDDCs are structured, certain aspects, such as the VAMI API, are restricted from customer access, blocking API calls that would work on-premises from working in an SDDC vCenter instance.
• Because of this, the only programmatic way to find out if a vCenter is living in an SDDC is to match the FQDN of the vCenter to the standardized FQDN format for all SDDC vCenters.
• The standardized format is vcenter.sddc-a-b-c-d.vmwarevmc.com.
• From this format, any vCenter with an FQDN that matches *.vmwarevmc.com is presumed to be living within an SDDC.
• If you have a vCenter connection already established through a PowerCLI session and you need to determine if this vCenter is within an SDDC, two methods can be followed:

1. Getting the DefaultVISServer Object
   • Executing:
     • $global:DefaultVIServer.Name
   • Returns:
     • vcenter.sddc-a-b-c-d.vmwarevmc.com
2. Getting the AdvancedSecuritySetting Object
   • Executing:
     • Get-AdvancedSetting -Entity $global:DefaultVIServer -Name config.vpxd.hostnameUrl | Select Name,Value
   • Returns:
     • Name                    Value
----                    -----
config.vpxd.hostnameUrl vcenter.sddc-a-b-c-d.vmwarevmc.com