In the previous post, I introduced the mental model for CI/CD against Private Cloud Director (PCD): a provisioning phase driven by Terraform, a configuration phase driven by Ansible, and a handoff between them through dynamic inventory. In this post, I’d like to zoom in on the provisioning phase and walk through what a GitOps pipeline […]
· May 19, 2026 · 14 min read
In earlier posts in the Automating Private Cloud Director series, I covered the Private Cloud Director (PCD) API, Terraform, Ansible, and enterprise integration patterns. Those posts focused on the primitives: the interfaces and tools you use to drive PCD programmatically. In this post, I’d like to shift from primitives to patterns, and specifically to the
· May 6, 2026 · 6 min read
This is the fourth post in the Automating Private Cloud Director series. The previous posts covered the foundational toolchain: API authentication, Terraform for infrastructure provisioning, and Ansible for infrastructure & post-deployment configuration. Those capabilities are sufficient for many organizations. But in enterprises with compliance requirements, regulated workloads, or large IT teams, “anyone can deploy from
· April 29, 2026 · 8 min read
This is the third post in the Automating Private Cloud Director series. In the first post, I covered the API surface and authentication. In the second, I walked through deploying a VM with Terraform. In this post, I’d like to cover Ansible. Where Terraform excels at declaring infrastructure state (“I want this VM, this volume,
· April 20, 2026 · 8 min read
This is the second post in the Automating Private Cloud Director series. In the first post, I covered the Private Cloud Director (PCD) API surface, how authentication works under the hood, and using the CLI. In this post, I’d like to walk through something practical: installing Terraform, pointing it at your PCD environment, and deploying
· April 15, 2026 · 8 min read
This is the first post in the Automating Private Cloud Director series. Everything you can do in the Private Cloud Director (PCD) UI, you can do through an API. Creating VMs, managing networks, configuring storage, assigning users to tenants. All of it. That’s not an afterthought; the UI itself is an API client. In this
· April 6, 2026 · 7 min read
If you’re evaluating a VMware alternative, monitoring is one of the first topics that comes up. It’s a capability that quietly blocks a migration if it’s missing. Your team already has dashboards, alerting rules, and capacity planning workflows built around vCenter and vROps. The question isn’t whether Private Cloud Director (PCD) has monitoring. It’s whether
· April 2, 2026 · 6 min read
Executive Summary Private Cloud Director (PCD) now provides built-in audit logging for core platform services, accessible through the UI and API. Audit logs capture administrative and operational actions across Identity, Compute, and Networking services, giving infrastructure teams a centralized record of who did what, when, and from where. This capability supports compliance workflows, change tracking,
· March 16, 2026 · 4 min read
Enterprise infrastructure teams are at a pivotal moment. Private clouds have never been more important for organizations, as new workloads demand on-premises deployment. At the same time, VMware’s licensing and business model changes under Broadcom are forcing many organizations to evaluate alternatives for a private cloud foundation. The immediate need is clear: a reliable, enterprise-grade
· June 18, 2025 · 7 min read
If you’ve spent years mastering the intricacies of vSphere, vCenter, NSX, and the broader VMware ecosystem, you know the power and stability it brings to the data center. But the tech landscape is always evolving, and perhaps you’re exploring alternatives like Platform9 Private Cloud Director – maybe for cost reasons, flexibility, or a desire to
· April 30, 2025 · 5 min read
In this blog, you will learn about Platform9 Private Cloud Director storage, including ephemeral (temporary) and persistent options. Discover Cinder’s block volume management with snapshots and resizing across backends like LVM, SAN, and NAS. Master storage policies via Cinder Volume Types and explore storage migration in Private Cloud Director. Introduction Storage is a fundamental pillar
· April 30, 2025 · 10 min read
In this blog, you will learn about Platform9 Private Cloud Director’s Virtual Machine High Availability (VM HA), a feature that automatically detects physical host failures within a cluster and recovers the affected VMs by restarting them on healthy hosts in the same cluster. Private Cloud Director refers to this recovery process as VM evacuation. The
· April 30, 2025 · 5 min read