CISCO ACI + vCenter Integration Error "Create a vSphere Distributed Switch" "Status: The operation is not supported on the object"

"Create a vSphere Distributed Switch"  

"Status: The operation is not supported on the object"

We were using CISCO ACI + vSphere for a while. We now have a new datacentre coming up and there were conversations on ACI vs NSX. But finally decided to give ACI a second chance :(

Current datacenters are on vSphere 6.0 and were linked to ACI with no issues.

We decided to go with latest 6.7 vSphere and Built them. ESXi hosts were added on to vCenter and a management DVS was created manually (we always had management DVS out side ACI!) and ESXi VMK0 was moved there, basically all went as per plan and well.

Then came the ACI integration part... We had 3 vCenters and they were all under same VMM domain. So we decided to add the new VC also there.

ACI Role was created in vCenter for permissions, service account is configured there mapping it to the new role. Time came for the integration and it wasn't happy about something.. After adding the new VC, ACI could see ESXi inventory. But the DVS creation was failing with below error in vCenter

Operation is not supported! Come on VMware what operation! 

Anyways I had to gig though logs to find out. Finally below is what I found in VPXA log

2019-09-06T01:33:50.907Z error vpxd[04740] [Originator@6876 sub=DvsUtils opID=7a4ad61f] Non-VMware DVS [Cisco Systems Inc.: ] is not supported
2019-09-06T01:33:51.003Z warning vpxd[04740] [Originator@6876 sub=dvsKeeper opID=7a4ad61f] DVS name [virtual] not in reserved map of DvsManager instance
2019-09-06T01:33:51.003Z info vpxd[04740] [Originator@6876 sub=vpxLro opID=7a4ad61f] [VpxLRO] -- FINISH task-3903
2019-09-06T01:33:51.003Z info vpxd[04740] [Originator@6876 sub=Default opID=7a4ad61f] [VpxLRO] -- ERROR task-3903 -- group-n41 -- vim.Folder.createDistributedVirtualSwitch: vmodl.fault.NotSupported:


So, the issue was.....
Old VM domains were created log time back and were set to use Cisco Systems Inc. as the vendor. VMware 6.0 just dosent care (for now! But upgrade to 6.5 will fail and if you look got KBs there is a way to modify it with a SQL command. Atelast we havent go that far and we will be migrating all VMs to the new DC once built and old once will be decommessioned!). But starting from 6.5 U1 VMware stopped supporting third parity DVS switches. Instead they've opned up APIs and said these vendors can now use APIs create and consume VDS (VMware Distributed Switches). 

Now getting back to how we fixed it. Our ACI was maintained well was updated to the latest. So we could just create a new VMM domain and could specify VMware there.  All worked well!

PowerCLI Install error on powershell

Today I was trying to install PowerCli on my Windows 10 machine using below command

Install-Module -Name VMware.PowerCLI -RequiredVersion 11.1.0.11289667

Ended up with an error "PackageManagement\Install-Package : The following commands are already available on this system:'Get-Cluster,New-Cluster,Remove-Cluster'. This module 'VMware.VimAutomation.Core' may override the existing commands. If you still want to install this module"

Looked like some of the modules are conflicting.
As per MS document here "If the module being installed has the same name or version, or contains commands in an existing module, warning messages are displayed. After you confirm that you want to install the module and override the warnings, use the -Force and -AllowClobber" 

So decided to use -AllowClobber and it worked!