Recently-Added on The IT Hollow

Woof - Replaced by AI

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve now reached the era where our jobs might be replaced by artificial intelligence. None of us are really immune to the impacts that AI will have on our jobs but I wasn’t expecting it to hit my household quite so soon.

No, it wasn’t my tech job that was replaced … yet. It wasn’t even my wife’s job, but instead it was my dog Charlie’s career that was impacted.

Brix Pizza - A Demo App

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 20:28:24 +0000

Over the past several years, I worked in marketing and spent a lot of time trying to make technical demos more compelling. The goal was always to demonstrate a capability or product feature, but there’s no reason a demo can’t also be fun, memorable, and grounded in reality.

“Hello World” gets the job done, but it doesn’t feel real. It doesn’t resemble how applications are actually built, deployed, or operated. And because of that, it’s easy to forget.

The Power of a Blameless Culture

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 05:53:54 +0000

Today marks the beginning of the 2024 Formula 1 season, a notable day for my mental well-being as it begins the end of a long, cold winter. The winter months often challenge me, limiting my time outdoors and casting shadows over my daily routines. The start of the Formula 1 season provides a needed distraction and spark of excitement as I look forward to warmer weather.

My interest in Formula 1 was ignited by the popular Netflix series, " Drive to Survive." Although new to the sport, I quickly became engrossed, but I initially found myself without a team to support. Over time, the Mercedes Formula 1 team stood out, embodying values I’ve always respected.

Harvester and IPMI Integration

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 02:58:17 +0000

Maybe it’s bougie, but one of the reasons I purchased E200-8d Supermicro Servers for my home lab was because they had IPMI built into them. Being able to remote into my lab at night when I’m messing around with different configurations was a nice to have. When I was consulting and traveling a lot, being able to remotely start my servers up was really important. I tested out things many times in my lab so that customers wouldn’t have to spend time figuring it out themselves. Anyway, the point is I bought servers with IPMI in them because I thought it was important.

Deploy Harvester VMs from a Template

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 15:00:00 +0000

Virtual infrastructure has a lot of advantages, but one of the biggest time savers is being able to provision new virtual machines quickly from a template. As part of this series we’ve covered, how to deploy harvester, how to setup a new virtual network , how to create a new virtual machine, and how to backup and restore VMs. In this post we’ll take a look at how we can create templates and deploy harvester VMs from templates.

Backup and Restore Harvester VMs

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 14:00:00 +0000

In our previous posts we setup a Harvester cluster in our lab, configured the network, and deployed our first VM. Here we will explore the backup and restore options available to us from the Harvester console. If you’re new to running virtual machines on Kubernetes, you’re probably questioning a few things, like will your current VM backup tool work? The answer is maybe, but only if it is able to backup a container since our VMs are now wrapped inside of a Kubernetes Pod thanks to Kubevirt. There are several options out there (I work for one of those companies myself) but this post only focuses on whats built into the Harvester solution.

The Harvester Home Lab - VMs and Containers

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 14:44:16 +0000

I have a very soft spot in my heart for VMware. Pretty early on in my career when I was a System Administrator I got the opportunity to convert my companies physical infrastructure to a virtual infrastructure on VMware vSphere. The version of VMware we moved to, is not relevant to this discussion other than to show how truly old I am, and in order to save the parties involved some embarrassment we’ll ignore this implementation detail.

Add Kubernetes to Harvester Installation

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 14:03:00 +0000

During the previous posts in this series, we deployed a Harvester cluster, setup virtual networks to segment traffic, and deployed our first virtual machine. So far this has been a pretty good experience, but most of my day job requires me to do a lot of work on containers so I’d like to have Kubernetes clusters at home. Of course I could deploy a bunch of VMs for a new Kubernetes cluster, but Harvester is built on top of Kubernetes already. So this post will show us how we can connect Rancher to our Harvester cluster so we can use the underlying Kubernetes cluster that Harvester runs on to run our own containers.

Create a Harvester Virtual Machine

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 14:02:00 +0000

In the previous posts, we setup the Harvester cluster and optionally added a virtual machine network and some cluster configs. In this post we’ll deploy our first Harvester virtual machine on our cluster. Before we do this, I wanted to point out that we’ve gotten to this point really without ever needing Kubernetes. If you’re paying close attention to the screens that have been showing up in the GUI, you might notice things like a namespace or labels or annotations that are clearly Kubernetes references. Even still, there’s really nothing in the steps up to this point where it would’ve required any Kubernetes experience at all. We’ll continue that trend as we build our first virtual machine.

Creating a Harvester Virtual Machine Network

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 14:01:00 +0000

In the first post in this series I deployed a Harvester cluster to my home lab servers. Before I get into deploying virtual machines though, I want to make some common configuration updates to my cluster. For instance, I want my virtual machine network traffic to be placed on a different network. Placing the small amount of network traffic that my virtual machines might be using on their own NIC is probably not necessary in my lab. But I wanted to build the lab in a way that somewhat mimics the way virtual machines are deployed in production environments so I can see how it works. When deploying VMware ESXi hosts, I would commonly have several virtual machine networks on their own NIC, each on their own VLAN. In this post we’ll deploy a Harvester virtual machine network.

Harvester Installation

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 14:00:00 +0000

The installation of Harvester starts with deploying your nodes. This process would be similar to deploying ESXi hosts in a VMware deployment. To start the process, download the latest stable harvester release from their github repository. You can then mount this ISO file from your bare metal server.

Create the First Harvester Node in a Cluster

After booting to the iso choose the version of Harvester to deploy from their GRUB list. In this example we’ll be using v1.2.1. Since this is the first node in my cluster, I will choose to create a new cluster, and then hit enter.

theITHollow Turns 10 Years Old

Sat, 19 Feb 2022 20:19:10 +0000

Yes, that’s right, this website is now 10 years old, and while there is no cake or ice cream for this celebration, I thought I’d take a second to reflect on what this website, and the 550 blog posts in it, have meant to me personally.

This site has in many ways chronicled my technology career, starting when I was a System Administrator, trying to learn Virtualization, up until now. I had no idea what I wanted this site to be, but I knew that I’d gained so much help from other bloggers in my day to day work, that I wanted to help out somebody myself. It seemed like the leave-a-penny / take-a-penny tray at a store. I didn’t want to only be taking penny’s out of that thing, sometimes you’ve got to be the one putting pennies in. That’s how I felt about my blog when I started.

VMware Tanzu Challenge - Plex Server

Fri, 28 Jan 2022 22:55:26 +0000

Early this year I saw a challenge drop in my inbox for VMware vExperts to deploy a Plex server with Tanzu Community Edition (TCE). I hadn’t gotten to try out TCE yet, and had never messed with Plex so this sounded like a fun adventure. The goal was to architect an entire solution as though this Plex server was going to be a production app that a company might run their business off of. Which means, that I needed to not only get the thing working, but start making some steps to operationalize it. You know of course that production systems come with security, observability, auto-scaling, an incident response routine, etc. Well, this is my home lab so we’ll have to assume that this is my minimum viable product, because as you’ll see, I could still put a lot of work in here.

Tanzu Community Edition on vSphere Installation Notes

Tue, 18 Jan 2022 00:09:59 +0000

I was messing around in my vSphere home lab and wanted to try out the new Tanzu Community Edition that was recently announced. After getting up to speed on some of the documentation, I tried the installation out in my vSphere 7 lab. There were a couple of notes that I think will help some other people get started with their installation.

TCE logo

Bootstrapping on MacBook

The installation on my MacBook kept failing when trying to deploy the management cluster in my vSphere environment. It turned out that the version of docker I was using was leveraging cgroupsv2 which caused an issue with the bootstrap process. You can read more info about the fixes being worked on in this GitHub issue. To workaround this issue, I pre-deployed a kind cluster using the command:

Configure a Private Registry for Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters

Wed, 22 Sep 2021 13:31:53 +0000

A really common task after deploying a Kubernetes cluster is to configure it to use a container registry where the container images are stored. A Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster (TKC) is no exception to this rule. vSphere 7 with Tanzu comes with an embedded harbor registry that can be used, but in many cases you all ready have your own container registry and so you’d like to continue using that instead.

Ubiquiti USG VPN Setup for VMware Cloud on AWS

Fri, 02 Jul 2021 16:15:22 +0000

My day job requires me to do a lot of work with VMware Cloud on AWS. If I plan on doing any real work with the virtual machines, kubernetes clusters, or applications I really need a VPN tunnel to securely access those resources. My problem has been setting up my aging Ubiquiti USG firewall with BGP. This post will show how I setup a route based VPN tunnel with my Ubiquiti USG. Big shoutout to Brian Beach for his work setting up the USG with an AWS Transit Gateway.

Home Audio/Visual Setup

Mon, 12 Apr 2021 14:05:00 +0000

I was asked for a post detailing my home A/V setup. So this post will outline the equipment in my office that I use for video conferencing and recording videos.

Desk

One of the best things I did for my office was to switch to a standing desk. I was spending way too much time sitting in a chair and a standing desk helped to alleviate muscle pain. It also kept me in a bit more active mood if that’s a thing. After doing a bit of research I decided to try the Terra 2 desk. My biggest concern with a standing desk was hiding cables in a desk with no front. So I added the cable chase which did help. It does block the front of the desk top though so if you want to mount anything like a monitor/camera/light mount beware that with the cable chase on, you can’t use a clamp.

2021 Home Lab

Mon, 08 Mar 2021 15:14:45 +0000

Time for an update on the home lab. 2020 meant spending a lot of time at home and there were plenty of opportunities to tinker around with the home lab. I did purchase some new hardware, and did plenty of reconfiguring so here’s the 2021 version of my home lab in case anyone is interested.

Rack

The rack is custom made and been in use for a while now. My lab sits in the basement on a concrete floor. So I built a wooden set of shelves on casters so I could roll it around if it was in the way. I place the UPS on the shelf so that I can unplug the power to move the lab. As long as I have a long enough Internet cable, I can wheel my lab around for as long as the UPS holds on. On one side I put a whiteboard so I could draw something out if I was stuck. I don’t use it that often, but I like that it covers the side of the rack.

Customize vSphere 7 with Tanzu Guest Clusters

Mon, 01 Feb 2021 15:29:00 +0000

Kubernetes clusters can come in many shapes and sizes. Over the past 18 months I’ve deployed quite a few Kubernetes clusters for customers but these clusters all have different requirements. What image registry am I connecting to? Do we need to configure proxies? Will we need to install new certificates to the nodes? Do we need to tweak some containerd configurations? During many of my customer engagements the answer to the above questions is, “yes”.

Enable the Harbor Registry on vSphere 7 with Tanzu

Mon, 04 Jan 2021 21:50:57 +0000

Your Kubernetes clusters are up and running on vSphere 7 with Tanzu and you can’t wait to get started on your first project. But before you get to that, you might want to enable the Harbor registry so that you can privately store your own container images and use them with your clusters. Luckily, in vSphere 7 with Tanzu, the Harbor project has been integrated into the solution. You just have to turn it on and set it up.

Deploy vSphere TKG Clusters Through Mission Control

Mon, 14 Dec 2020 15:03:00 +0000

There is new functionality included in VMware Tanzu Mission Control (TMC) that I’m pretty excited about. After the recent update, you can now register your vSphere with Tanzu Supervisor cluster with TMC and then begin provisioning workload clusters.

Before you can provision clusters, you’ll need to register your TKG Supervisor cluster to TMC. Those procedures require you to apply and update some YAML which you can find here.

Deploy a vSphere TKG Cluster through TMC

Login to your TMC account and go to the Clusters tab. Click the CREATE CLUSTER button where you’ll now see a drop down. Select Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service on vSphere 7.

Resizing Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Cluster Nodes

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 15:05:00 +0000

Have you ever missed when trying to properly size an Kubernetes environment? Maybe the requirements changed, maybe there were wrong assumptions, or maybe the project took off and it just needs more resources. Under normal circumstances, I might suggest to you to build a new Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) cluster and re-deploy your apps. Unfortunately, as much as I want to treat Kubernetes clusters as ephemeral, they can’t always be treated this way. If you need to resize your TKG nodes without re-deploying a new cluster, then keep reading.

Non-Interactive Logins to vSphere 7 with Tanzu Clusters

Tue, 01 Dec 2020 15:00:00 +0000

You’ve deployed your first Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Clusters in vSphere 7 and are beyond the learning phase. You’re now ready to start automating your Kubernetes cluster builds, and application deployments.

Typically you’d login to your TKG clusters through the kubectl cli with a command like:

kubectl vsphere login ...

Normally, you’d be right, but that command requires an interactive login, meaning for you to wait for a second prompt to enter a password. The current version of the vSphere plugin doesn’t have an option for non-interactive logins so we need to get creative until this feature is added.

Using YTT to Customize TKG Deployments

Mon, 09 Nov 2020 15:05:00 +0000

If you’ve worked with Kubernetes for very long, you’ve surely run into a need to manage YAML files. There are a bunch of options out there with their own benefits and drawbacks. One of these tools is called ytt and comes as part of the Carvel tools (formerly k14s).

If you’re working with the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid product from VMware, you’re likely to be using ytt to mange your TKG YAML manifests. This post aims to help you get started with using ytt for your own customizations.

Create a Content Library for vSphere 7 with Tanzu

Tue, 08 Sep 2020 14:15:00 +0000

In this post we’ll setup a vSphere Content Library so that we can use it with our Tanzu Kubernetes Grid guest clusters. If you’re not familiar with Content libraries, you can think of them as a container registry, only for virtual machines.

Why do we need a content library? Well, the content library be used to store the virtual machine templates that will become Kubernetes nodes when you deploy a TKG guest cluster.

Hello World - COVID-19 and Golang

Sun, 22 Mar 2020 17:53:26 +0000

There is a worldwide pandemic going on right now and it has disrupted practically everything. Many people are worried not only about their health and families health, but also their job situations. I feel incredibly fortunate that my employer seems intent on continuing to work through this situation and that I am already a remote worker most of the time.

My team was asked to of course take care of our families, but also to take this opportunity to learn something new. I took this respite from normal activities to try to learn how to do some basic Golang (Go) programming. I have a hard time focusing on a project sometimes when there are no specific goals in mind, so my “Hello World” attempt at programming in Golang was to grab the latest COVID-19 statistics and post them to slack once per day.

Tanzu Mission Control Getting Started Guide

Tue, 10 Mar 2020 18:04:19 +0000

VMware Tanzu is a family of products and services for modernizing your applications and infrastructure with a common goal: deliver better software to production, continuously. The portfolio simplifies multi-cloud operations, while freeing developers to move faster and access the right resources for building the best applications. VMware Tanzu enables development and operations’ teams to work together in new ways that deliver transformative business results.

One of these new solutions within the Tanzu brand is Mission Control. If you’re looking to get started with Tanzu Mission Control for management and visibility for your Kubernetes Clusters, start with the articles below. You’ll learn the basics of Tanzu Mission Control, how to deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters, assigning policies, and managing lifecycles of those clusters.

Use a Private Registry with Kubernetes

Tue, 03 Mar 2020 21:09:07 +0000

Most of the blog posts I write about Kubernetes have examples using publicly available images from public image registries like DockerHub or Google Container Registry. But in the real world, companies use private registries for storing their container images. There are a list of reasons why you might want to do this including:

Custom code is inside the container such as business logic or other intellectual property.
On-premises private repos provide solutions to bandwidth or firewall restrictions.
Custom scanning software is being integrated for vulnerability management.

In this post, we’ll setup our Kubernetes cluster to be able to use a private container registry.

Highly Available Envoy Proxies for the Kubernetes Control Plane

Mon, 24 Feb 2020 15:05:00 +0000

Recently I was tasked with setting up some virtual machines to be used as a load balancer for a Kubernetes cluster. The environment we were deploying our Kubernetes cluster didn’t have a load balancer available, so we thought we’d just throw some envoy proxies on some VMs to do the job. This post will show you how the following tasks were completed:

Deploy Envoy on a pair of CentOS7 virtual machines.
Configure Envoy with health checks for the Kubernetes Control Plane
Install keepalived on both servers to manage failover.
Configure keepalived to failover if a server goes offline, or the envoy service is not started.

Deploy Envoy

The first step will be to setup a pair of CentOS 7 servers. I’ve used virtual servers for this post, but baremetal would work the same. Also, similar steps could be used if you prefer debian as your linux flavor.

Kubernetes Logs for Troubleshooting

Wed, 12 Feb 2020 16:57:36 +0000

Sometimes things don’t go quite as we’ve planned. When that happens in a computer system, we turn to the logs to tell us what went wrong, and to give us some clues on either how to fix the issue, or where to look for the next clue.This post focuses on where to look for issues in your Kubernetes deployment.

Before we dive into the logs, we must acknowledge that there are different ways to install a kubernetes cluster. The pieces and parts can be deployed as system services or containers, and the way to obtain their logs will change. This post uses a previous post about a k8s install as an example of where to find those logs.

Kubernetes HA on vSphere

Mon, 27 Jan 2020 15:15:12 +0000

If you’ve been on the operations side of the IT house, you know that one of your primary job functions is to ensure High Availability (HA) of production workloads. This blog post focuses on making sure applications deployed on a vSphere Kubernetes cluster will be highly available.

The Control Plane

Ok, before we talk about workloads, we should discuss the Kubernetes Control plane components. When we deploy Kubernetes on virtual machines, we have to make sure that the brains of the Kubernetes cluster will continue working even if there is a hardware failure. The first step is to make sure that your control plane components are deployed on different physical (ESXi) hosts. This can be done with a vSphere Host Affinity Rule to keep k8s VMs pinned to groups of hosts or anti-affinity rules to make sure two control plane nodes aren’t placed on the same host. After this is done, your Load Balancer should be configured to point to your k8s control plane VMs and a health check is configured for the /healthz path.

Active Directory Authentication for Kubernetes Clusters

Tue, 21 Jan 2020 15:15:24 +0000

You’ve stood up your Kubernetes (k8s) cluster and are really looking forward to all of your coworkers deploying containers on it. How will you get everyone logged in? Creating local service accounts and distributing KUBECONFIG files (securely), seems like a real chore. This post will show how you can use Active Directory authentication for Kubernetes Clusters.

This post will use two projects, dex and gangway, to perform the authentication against ldap and return the Kubernetes login information to the user’s browser. The end result will look something like the screen below. The authenticated user will receive instructions on installing the client and setting up certificates for authentication.

Deploy Kubernetes on AWS

Mon, 13 Jan 2020 15:15:39 +0000

The way you deploy Kubernetes (k8s) on AWS will be similar to how it was done in a previous post on vSphere. You still setup nodes, you still deploy kubeadm, and kubectl but there are a few differences when you change your cloud provider. For instance on AWS we can use the LoadBalancer resource against the k8s API and have AWS provision an elastic load balancer for us. These features take a few extra tweaks in AWS.

Deploy Kubernetes on vSphere

Wed, 08 Jan 2020 15:00:04 +0000

If you’re struggling to deploy Kubernetes (k8s) clusters, you’re not alone. There are a bunch of different ways to deploy Kubernetes and there are different settings depending on what cloud provider you’re using. This post will focus on installing Kubernetes on vSphere with Kubeadm. At the end of this post, you should have what you need to manually deploy k8s in a vSphere environment on ubuntu.

Prerequisites

NOTE: This tutorial uses the “in-tree” cloud provider for vSphere. This is not the preferred method for deployment going forward. More details can be found here for reference.

Kubernetes - Pod Security Policies

Tue, 19 Nov 2019 15:05:04 +0000

Securing and hardening our Kubernetes clusters is a must do activity. We need to remember that containers are still just processes running on the host machines. Sometimes these processes can get more privileges on the Kubernetes node than they should, if you don’t properly setup some pod security. This post explains how this could be done for your own clusters.

Pod Security Policies - The Theory

Pod Security policies are designed to limit what can be run on a Kubernetes cluster. Typical things that you might want to limit are: pods that have privileged access, pods with access to the host network, and pods that have access to the host processes just to name a few. Remember that a container isn’t as isolated as a VM so we should take care to ensure our containers aren’t adversely affecting our nodes’s health and security.

Modularized Kubernetes Environments with Jenkins

Mon, 11 Nov 2019 15:05:36 +0000

There are a myraid of ways to deploy Kubernetes clusters these days.

Those are just a few of the ways and I’m sure you’ll have a favorite. But for the work I’ve been doing lately, I don’t want to spend a bunch of time cloning repos, updating configs, running ansible scripts and the like, just to get another clean kubernetes cluster in my lab to break. So, I took the individual parts of a Kubernetes build and created a list of ordered jobs in my Jenkins server.

Set Your Breakpoints - Vacations

Mon, 14 Oct 2019 14:10:36 +0000

In programming, we sometime set breakpoints as a way of debugging our code. Maybe a small piece of our routine isn’t functioning optimally and we want the program to pause, part way through, so we can identify the issues with that one section of code.

These breakpoints might be great for coding, but we can apply this to our own lives as well. I’ve recently switched jobs and between ending my previous job and starting the new one, I took some time off. My own personal breakpoint where I paused the larger routine (in this metaphor, the routine is my work life) so that I could focus on pieces of my life that might need more attention.

A Kind Way to Learn Kubernetes

Mon, 07 Oct 2019 14:10:13 +0000

I’m not going to lie to you, as of the time of this writing, maybe the biggest hurdle to learning Kubernetes is getting a cluster stood up. Right now there are a myriad of ways so stand up a cluster, but none of them are really straight forward yet. If you’re interested in learning how Kubernetes works, and just want to setup a basic cluster to poke around in, this post is for you.

A Change of Scenery

Mon, 30 Sep 2019 14:02:14 +0000

So Long AHEAD

I have been fortunate to work for a fantastic company the past five and half years. While starting at AHEAD I had ambitions to be a top caliber VMware expert and work with people who would challenge me. Part of my decision to join the AHEAD team was to see how good I really was. AHEAD had plenty of talent and three VCDXs when I started and I needed to know how I stacked up. In the end, I think I did OK.

Kubernetes - Desired State and Control Loops

Mon, 16 Sep 2019 14:05:30 +0000

If you’ve just gotten started with Kubernetes, you might be curious to know how the desired state is achieved? Think about it, you pass a YAML file to the API server and magically stuff happens. Not only that, but when disaster strikes (e.g. pod crashes) Kubernetes also makes it right again so that it matches the desired state.

The mechanism that allows for Kubernetes to enforce this desired state is the control loop. The basics of this are pretty simple. A control loop can be though of in three stages.

Sysdig Secure 2.4 Announced

Tue, 06 Aug 2019 13:17:20 +0000

Today Sysdig announced a new update to their Cloud Native Visibility and Security Platform, with the release of Sysdig Secure 2.4.

The new version of the Secure product includes some pretty nifty enhancements.

Runtime profiling with machine learning - New containers will be profiled after deployment to give insights into the processes, file system activity, networking and system calls. Once the profiling is complete, these profiles can be used to create policy sets for the expected behavior. Sysdig also offers a confidence level of the profile. Consistent behavior generating a higher confidence level whereas variable behavior would have a lower level.

Kubernetes - Taints and Tolerations

Mon, 29 Jul 2019 14:15:22 +0000

One of the best things about Kubernetes, is that I don’t have to think about which piece of hardware my container will run on when I deploy it. The Kubernetes scheduler can make that decision for me. This is great until I actually DO care about what node my container runs on. This post will examine one solution to pod placement, through taints and tolerations.

Taints - The Theory

Suppose we had a Kubernetes cluster where we didn’t want any pods to run on a specific node. You might need to do this for a variety of reasons, such as:

Monitoring Kubernetes with Sysdig Monitor

Sun, 23 Jun 2019 14:10:02 +0000

Any system that’s going to be deployed for the enterprise needs to have at least a basic level of monitoring in place to manage it. Kubernetes is no exception to this rule. When we, as a community, underwent the shift from physical servers to virtual infrastructure, we didn’t ignore the new VMs and just keep monitoring the hardware, we had to come up with new products to monitor our infrastructure. Sysdig is building these new solutions for the Kubernetes world.

Kubernetes - Helm

Mon, 10 Jun 2019 14:02:52 +0000

The Kubernetes series has now ventured into some non-native k8s discussions. Helm is a relatively common tool used in the industry and it makes sense to talk about why that is. This post covers the basics of Helm so we can make our own evaluations about its use in our Kubernetes environment.

Helm - The Theory

So what is Helm? In the most simplest terms its a package manager for Kubernetes.
Think of Helm this way, Helm is to Kubernetes as yum/apt is to Linux. Yeah, sounds pretty neat now doesn’t it?

Kubernetes - Role Based Access

Mon, 20 May 2019 14:10:48 +0000

As with all systems, we need to be able to secure a Kubernetes cluster so that everyone doesn’t have administrator privileges on it. I know this is a serious drag because no one wants to deal with a permission denied error when we try to get some work done, but permissions are important to ensure the safety of the system. Especially when you have multiple groups accessing the same resources. We might need a way to keep those groups from stepping on each other’s work, and we can do that through role based access controls.

Its Up to You to Decide if Apps are Cheaper in the Cloud

Tue, 19 Mar 2019 14:20:29 +0000

Whenever I talk cloud with a customer, there is inevitably a discussion around how much the cloud costs vs what is in the data center. The conversation usually starts with one of several declarations.

“The Cloud is more expensive than on-premises but we want the capabilities anyway.”

“We need the Cloud so we can drive down our costs.”

Well yes, if you’ve paid attention, those are two different arguments about why you need cloud, and both of them came to different conclusions about whether or not the public cloud is more expensive or less expensive than running your own data center.

Kubernetes - Services and Labels

Thu, 31 Jan 2019 15:00:54 +0000

If you’ve been following the series, you may be thinking that we’ve built ourselves a problem. You’ll recall that we’ve now learned about Deployments so that we can roll out new pods when we do upgrades, and replica sets can spin up new pods when one dies. Sounds great, but remember that each of those containers has a different IP address. Now, I know we haven’t accessed any of those pods yet, but you can imagine that it would be a real pain to have to go lookup an IP Address every time a pod was replaced, wouldn’t it? This post covers Kubernetes Services and how they are used to address this problem, and at the end of this post, we’ll access one of our pods … finally.

Kubernetes - Deployments

Wed, 30 Jan 2019 15:01:37 +0000

After following the previous posts, we should feel pretty good about deploying our pods and ensuring they are highly available. We’ve learned about naked pods and then replica sets to make those pods more HA, but what about when we need to create a new version of our pods? We don’t want to have an outage when our pods are replaced with a new version do we? This is where “Deployments” comes into play.

Kubernetes - Replica Sets

Mon, 28 Jan 2019 15:00:59 +0000

In a previous post we covered the use of pods and deployed some “naked pods” in our Kubernetes cluster. In this post we’ll expand our use of pods with Replica Sets.

Replica Sets - The Theory

One of the biggest reasons that we don’t deploy naked pods in production is that they are not trustworthy. By this I mean that we can’t count on them to always be running. Kubernetes doesn’t ensure that a pod will continue running if it crashes. A pod could die for all kinds of reasons such as a node that it was running on had failed, it ran out of resources, it was stopped for some reason, etc. If the pod dies, it stays dead until someone fixes it which is not ideal, but with containers we should expect them to be short lived anyway, so let’s plan for it.

AWS Native Backups

Tue, 22 Jan 2019 16:00:59 +0000

Amazon Web Services has released yet another service designed to improve the lives of people administering an AWS environment. There is a new backup service, cleverly named, AWS Backup.

This new service allows you to create a backup plan for Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, Elastic File System (EFS), DynamoDB, Relational Database Services (RDS), and Storage Gateway.

Now we can build plans to automatically backup, tier and expire old backups automatically based on our own criteria.

Kubernetes - Pods

Mon, 21 Jan 2019 16:30:30 +0000

We’ve got a Kubernetes cluster setup and we’re ready to start deploying some applications. Before we can deploy any of our containers in a kubernetes environment, we’ll need to understand a little bit about pods.

Pods - The Theory

In a docker environment, the smallest unit you’d deal with is a container. In the Kubernetes world, you’ll work with a pod and a pod consists of one or more containers. You cannot deploy a bare container in Kubernetes without it being deployed within a pod.

Deploy Kubernetes Using Kubeadm - CentOS7

Mon, 14 Jan 2019 15:35:36 +0000

I’ve been wanting to have a playground to mess around with Kubernetes (k8s) deployments for a while and didn’t want to spend the money on a cloud solution like AWS Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes or Google Kubernetes Engine . While these hosted solutions provide additional features such as the ability to spin up a load balancer, they also cost money every hour they’re available and I’m planning on leaving my cluster running. Also, from a learning perspective, there is no greater way to learn the underpinnings of a solution than having to deploy and manage it on your own. Therefore, I set out to deploy k8s in my vSphere home lab on some CentOS 7 virtual machines using Kubeadm. I found several articles on how to do this but somehow I got off track a few times and thought another blog post with step by step instructions and screenshots would help others. Hopefully it helps you. Let’s begin.

Lucidchart Integrations with AWS

Tue, 08 Jan 2019 15:00:02 +0000

Okay, I’m scared of change just like everyone else. I have been building Visios for a pretty long time and know where all the menus are so I’m pretty fast with it. But I do use a Macbook when I travel and firing up Fusion just to run Visio is frustrating. I thought since it’s a new year I should try Lucidchart and see what I though. Now I’m still kind of fond of Visio, but the Integrations feature with Lucidchart on top of the web interface allowing me to use it anywhere, is enough to make me drop Visio for the long haul.

This is Not Fine!

Thu, 25 Oct 2018 17:55:07 +0000

I recently attended the Devops Enterprise Summit in Las Vegas so that I could keep up to date on the latest happenings around integrating devops for companies. This conference was nothing short of amazing, but what I wasn’t anticipating was a theme around IT burnout. The IT Revolutions team who puts on the conference started one of the keynotes on the topic of burnout, from Dr. Christina Maslach who is Professor of Psychology, Emerita University of California, Berkeley. In addition to this powerful session, there was another panel group that happened on Wednesday, that went further into the discussion including the ultimate consequence of burnout, which is suicide.

Restore or Resize an AWS Transit Router

Mon, 22 Oct 2018 14:03:21 +0000

A transit VPC is a pretty common networking pattern in an AWS environment. [Transit VPCs](http://Should I use a Transit VPC in AWS?) can limit the number of peering connections required to connect all your VPCs by switching from a mesh topology of peers to a hub and spoke method with transit. While transit VPCs offer some nice features, it also requires a bit more management overhead since you need to manage your own routers. Cisco makes the deployment of transit routers very easy but sometimes you need to make some changes to the routers after they’re deployed like if you need to resize them. Also, sometimes bad things happen and those routers can be destroyed by accident. This post shows how you can resize your Cisco CSRs and/or restore an old configuration from snapshot.

AWS Custom Resources

Tue, 04 Sep 2018 14:00:04 +0000

We love to use AWS CloudFormation to deploy our environments. Its like configuration management for our AWS infrastructure in the sense that we write a desired state as code and apply it to our environment. But sometimes, there are tasks that we want to complete that aren’t part of CloudFormation. For instance, what if we wanted to use CloudFormation to deploy a new account which needs to be done through the CLI, or if we need to return some information to our CloudFormation template before deploying it? Luckily for us we can use a Custom Resource to achieve our goals. This post shows how you can use CloudFormation with a Custom Resource to execute a very basic Lambda function as part of a deployment.

Add AWS Web Application Firewall to Protect your Apps

Mon, 20 Aug 2018 14:02:31 +0000

Some things change when you move to the cloud, but other things are very much the same. Like protecting your resources from outside threats. There are always no-gooders out there trying to steal data, or cause mayhem like in those Allstate commercials. Our first defense should be well written applications, requiring authentication, etc and with AWS we make sure we’re setting up security groups to limit our access to those resources. How about an extra level of protection from a Web Application Firewall. AWS WAF allows us to leverage some extra protections at the edge to protect us from those bad guys/girls.

Should I use a Transit VPC in AWS?

Mon, 16 Jul 2018 14:05:46 +0000

A common question that comes up during AWS designs is, “Should I use a transit VPC?” The answer, like all good IT riddles is, “it depends.” There are a series of questions that you must ask yourself before deciding whether to use a Transit VPC or not. In this post, I’ll try to help formulate those questions so you can answer this question yourself.

The Basics

Before we can ask those tough questions, we first should answer the question, “What is a Transit VPC?” Well, a transit VPC acts as an intermediary for routing between two places. Just like a transit network bridges traffic between two networks, a transit VPC ferries traffic between two VPCs or perhaps your data center.

Who is Heptio?

Mon, 09 Jul 2018 14:00:53 +0000

There are a dozen new technologies being introduced every day that never amount to anything, while others move on to create completely new methodologies for how we interact with IT. Just like virtualization changed the way data centers operate, containers are changing how we interact with our applications and Kubernetes (K8s in short hand) seems to be a front runner in this space. However, with any new technology hitting the market, there is a bit of a lag before it takes off. People have to understand why it’s needed, who’s got the best solution, and how you can make it work with your own environment. Heptio is a startup company focusing on helping enterprises embrace Kubernetes through their open source tools and professional services. I’ve been hearing great things about Heptio, but when my good friend, Tim Carr, decided to go work for there, I decided that I better look into who they are, and figure out what he sees in their little startup.

The Dark Side of Stress

Mon, 18 Jun 2018 14:06:40 +0000

I took last week off from work to spend some time with my family and just relax. I’d never been to Disney World and have a six year old who is seriously into Star Wars, so this sounded like a great way to take a relaxing week off. During this vacation I found that it took several days before I even started to unwind. I ended the work week on a Friday and still felt the work stress through the weekend and into Monday. Maybe it’s a normal thing to still feel the stress through the weekend, but I had expected to feel an immediate release of tension when I was done with work on Friday when my vacation began. But all weekend I kept noticing that I couldn’t forget about work. In fact, I felt pretty sick one day and believe it was stress related. After a few days I started to pay attention to the activities of the day and didn’t pay as much attention, but it made me think that those two day weekends and how they certainly weren’t recharging me to be prepared for the next week of stress.

Use Hashicorp's Vault to Dynamically Create Mysql Credentials

Mon, 04 Jun 2018 15:26:01 +0000

Passwords are a necessary evil to keep bandits from running away with your confidential data. We’ve come up with various strategies to manage these secrets, such as:

Using one password for all of your stuff so you don’t forget it.
Use a password vault to store a unique password for each of your logins.
Use a few passwords in a pattern you can remember.
Write down your password on a sticky note and attach it to your monitor.

Now, not all of these practices are good but you get the idea.

Protect Your AWS Accounts with GuardDuty

Mon, 02 Apr 2018 14:05:29 +0000

Locking down an AWS environment isn’t really that if you know what threats you’re protecting against. You have services such as the Web Application Firewall, Security Groups, Network Access Control Lists, Bucket Policies and the list goes on. But many times you encounter threats from malicious attackers just trying to probe which vulnerabilities might exist in your cloud. AWS has built a service, called Amazon GuardDuty, to help monitor and protect your environment that is based on AWS machine learning tools and threat intelligence feeds. GuardDuty currently reads VPC Flow Logs (used for network traffic analysis) and CloudTrail Logs (used for control plane access analysis) along with DNS log data to protect an AWS environment. GuardDuty will use threat intelligence feeds to alert you when your workloads may be communicating with known to be malicious IP Addresses and can alert you when privileged escalation occurs as part of its machine learning about suspicious patterns.

Fill Your Skills Tank

Mon, 26 Mar 2018 14:10:55 +0000

Information Technology is a very difficult field to keep up with. Not only does computing power increase year after year, making the number of things we can do with computers increase, but drastic transformations always plague this industry. Complete paradigm shifts are a major part of our recent past such as mainframes, to client/server, to virtualization to cloud computing. In addition to these changes there are also silos of technologies we might want to focus on such as database design, programming, infrastructure or cloud computing. Inside each of these categories there are different platforms to learn, such as if you are a programmer, do you know C++, Java, Python or Cobol?

Woke to IT Age Discrimination

Mon, 12 Mar 2018 14:06:04 +0000

Age discrimination can be an issue in any industry, but this issue is something members of the information technology (IT) industry can specifically identify with. My goal for this post is just to shine some light on the topic and discuss whether or not there is an injustice happening in IT when you reach a certain age, or if there is some less heinous reason why we see so many younger people in tech. I want to make it crystal clear that this is just an off the cuff discussion and not based on any discrimination that I’ve been witness to from my employer or anywhere else. Ageism has been a bit of the elephant in the room where I don’t see many people discussing it publicly, but it’s in the back of people’s mind. It does seem that there are many more young people in the technology industry than older people, but this also may just be a perception and not reality.

Rubrik Acquires Datos IO

Tue, 06 Feb 2018 14:02:17 +0000

There is news in the backup world today. Rubrik has acquired startup company Datos IO.

Who is Datos IO?

Datos IO was founded in 2014 and focuses on copy data management of distributed scale out databases purpose built for the cloud. The reason Datos IO is different from the common backup solutions we’re accustomed to seeing (Commvault, DataDomain, etc) is that they are building a solution from the ground up that tackles the problems of geo-dispersed scale out database which are becoming commonplace in the cloud world. Think about databases that scale multiple continents, and multiple clouds even.

Commit to Infrastructure As Code

Mon, 08 Jan 2018 15:10:30 +0000

Over recent years, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has become sort of a utopian goal of many organizations looking to modernize their infrastructure. The benefits to IaC have been covered many times so I won’t go into too much detail, but the highlights include:

Reproducibility of an environment
Reduction in deployment time
Linking infrastructure deployments with application deployments
Source control for infrastructure items
Reduction of misconfiguration

The reasoning behind storing all of your infrastructure as code is valid and a worthy goal. The agility, stability, and deployment speeds achieved through IaC can prove to have substantial benefits to the business as a whole.

New Opportunities in 2018

Mon, 01 Jan 2018 17:25:01 +0000

It’s the beginning of a whole new year. Hopefully you’ve gotten some time off recently to recharge your batteries a bit, before heading back to the grind. While you’re getting back into the ol’ routine, maybe this is a good time to consider whether or not that routine is still worthwhile?

Are you Happy With Your Job?

I t’s easy to get into a funk where you roll out of bed each day to do the same task or face the same challenges over and over again. Maybe there are things in your day to day grind that you hate, but do them anyway, because it’s part of your job. No big deal, everyone has these sorts of chores. I’m sure that nobody loves every single part of their job. But if you’ve gotten a break from work and you can’t bear to think about going back to that routine, maybe that should tell you something about your job. Are you really happy doing what you’re doing, or are you doing it because it’s a steady paycheck? Are you doing it because it’s what you know, and change is hard? Are you doing it because you feel like you have no other choice?

AWS DeepLens - The Nuclear Weapon of Privacy

Wed, 29 Nov 2017 20:07:21 +0000

Today at AWS re:INVENT, Amazon had several new product announcements which is not uncommon for the company but one in-particular raised several eyebrows. Amazon has been working very hard to make machine learning much easier for people to use. Typically, understanding machine learning has taken great expertise and a relatively small number of people even attempted to learn these concepts just because of the complexity. That is all changing thanks to some of Amazon’s more recently announced services such as Amazon Sage Maker.

Baseball: The Sport for Geeks

Mon, 09 Oct 2017 15:05:00 +0000

Geeks and sports just don’t mix. Well, thats not really true, but seems to be the stereotype that I’m accustomed to hearing. If you’re good with computers, or like science, then you probably don’t get, or don’t like sports. But here’s another crass generalization that I’ll make with absolutely no statistics to back it up: Baseball should be the sport that geeks gravitate towards.

It’s a Giant Algorithm

One of the knocks I hear about baseball is that the game is just too slow. It is in fact a slower paced game than basketball, hockey, soccer or really any sport that uses a game clock. But that’s what geeks should love about the game. It’s a game of anticipation for what’s going to happen next. But the list of things that will happen during any play is pretty small and they’re all based on “IF / THEN” rules just like in computer science. Let me give you an example.

ServiceNow Streamlines Operations

Tue, 05 Sep 2017 15:00:07 +0000

We focus a lot of time talking about public cloud and provisioning. Infrastructure as code has changed the way in which we can deploy our workloads and how our teams are structured. We’re even allowing other teams to deploy their own workloads through our cloud management portals. But some things haven’t changed all that much.

When I mention ServiceNow the first things that come to your mind are probably “Change Ticketing”, “CMDB”, or “Asset Management”. While ServiceNow certainly does all of those things, the real purpose of ServiceNow is to streamline operations. Many people who work in the enterprise probably think of ServiceNow as something that just gets in their way. No one wants to stop what they’re doing to enter a change ticket, wait for an approval or update a configuration item once deploying new servers, it’s a pain. But ServiceNow really is meant to speed up the operations process.

Will Killing Net Neutrality End the Public Cloud?

Mon, 07 Aug 2017 14:05:27 +0000

In today’s world, if you can get an Internet connection, you can go anywhere and connect to any service that is publicly available. No restrictions are imposed and you can use the entire amount of bandwidth you purchased from your Internet service provider. This is the world under Net Neutrality. To illustrate this point further take the following example.

If you purchase a 25Mbps circuit from Comcast or AT&T, you can use all of that bandwidth, assuming the service on the other end is also providing 25Mbps or better.

HPE Built Another Cloud - Storage This Time

Tue, 01 Aug 2017 14:05:24 +0000

HPE recently announced that they were getting deeper into the cloud game bin introducing their Nimble Cloud Volumes (NCV) solution. Now while this sounds a lot like a storage array function, it’s really its own separate cloud that is focused only on storage. The idea behind it is that storage in both AWS and Azure isn’t great for enterprises and they want a better option to connect to their EC2 instances or Azure VMs.

What's Worth Interrupting Shark week? CFD2

Mon, 31 Jul 2017 13:55:51 +0000

Once a year the Discovery channel has a Shark-a-palooza around all things sharks. Silly contests like having Olympic swimmers race CGI sharks, Dirty Jobs hosts doing gross stuff with sharks, people busting shark myths… you get the picture. It’s one of my favorite weeks because you can learn stuff about cool animals and there is something to watch on TV during the summer.

But this year I gave up much of my Shark Week for a good cause. The folks over at GestaltIT were having their Cloud Field Day 2 in Silicon Valley and they were gracious enough to invite me to join them as a delegate.

Blogging Balance

Tue, 20 Jun 2017 14:05:28 +0000

Blogging has been a labor of love for me for a little over five years now. I started a blog to get my own ideas written down, to document my own experiences with technology and to try to give back to an industry who had helped me improve my own skills. But blogging hasn’t been an easy thing all of the time and often comes with challenges. If you’re new to blogging and thinking about getting started, this post may help you figure out how you want to blog and if you’re an experienced blogger, I expect that you can relate to this post.

Containers on vRealize Automation

Mon, 08 May 2017 14:07:41 +0000

Version 7.2 of vRealize Automation introduced containers to the vRA solution. This post is designed to get you up and running with some basic containers and give you the tools needed to deploy some of your own containers in your environment.

The steps involved in this post assume that you have the “Container Administrator” and “Container Architect” roles. These are administrative roles that you’d need to get things started in your vRA instance.

Whats in the Lab for 2017?

Mon, 01 May 2017 14:02:48 +0000

To me, a home lab is an important piece of my ongoing education. It’s one thing to watch videos and take classes but getting some time to build, configure or run solutions in your own setting is an invaluable resource. In my life, I’ve never learned anything REALLY well until I’ve had to operate and troubleshoot it. Having a mission critical system crash and having to learn how to fix it is a great way to learn things very quickly but also pretty painful. So to me, a home lab is critical.

Your Rubrik for the Cloud

Tue, 25 Apr 2017 13:05:09 +0000

Rubrik has announced their latest revision of their Cloud Data Management solution, version 3.2. The new release has some “Snazzy” new features according to one unnamed source from the Rubrik technical marketing team, but I’m focused mainly on one specific capability in this post.

I’ve written about Rubrik several times before and have written some of the vRealize Orchestrator workflows for automating deployments with the Rubrik appliance. The main reason I like the solution is how easy it is to manage and that everything is API first, which is a must for automation these days.

Getting Started with vRealize Code Stream

Mon, 24 Apr 2017 14:05:22 +0000

vRealize Code Stream is a tool that is used to operationalize infrastructure code blueprints for release management. Code Stream plugs into vRealize Automation and includes a testing framework though Jenkins and vRealize Orchestrator as well as using JFrog Artifactory and Xenon for storing artifacts. This post is used to organize several blog posts on helping you to get started with vRealize Code Stream and Houdini.

Setting up Code Stream and Jenkins

Setting up Code Stream and Artifactory

Installing vRealize Code Stream for IT DevOps

Configuring Endpoints for vRealize Code Stream for IT DevOps

Using vRealize Code Stream for IT DevOps

Unit Testing with vRealize Code Stream for IT DevOps

Official Documentation:

vRealize Code Stream Information Center VMware vRealize Code Stream Management Pack for IT DevOps Installation Guide

Using Packer to Create vSphere and AWS Images

Mon, 06 Mar 2017 15:15:52 +0000

Packer is a free tool from Hashicorp that allows you to build new images. Keeping base vSphere templates up to date is not too difficult of a task for many, but as we add things like AWS accounts and regions, it’s pretty easy to have sprawl to deal with. We’d like to make sure that an image in our vSphere datacenter looks the same as an image in our public clouds.

Intermediate vRA Course on Pluralsight

Mon, 20 Feb 2017 15:04:31 +0000

It’s the moment you’ve all (really a few of you) been waiting for! The long anticipated sequel to the " Getting Started vRealize Automation Course" is now live on the Pluralsight catalog. This new course will join the likes of other sequels that were even better than the originals including:

Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan
Batman: The Dark Knight
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Predator 2 (Lol, Just kidding)

The first course covered the basics behind vRealize Automation, but this new course will cover things like:

Pros and Cons of Amazon's Key Management Service

Mon, 13 Feb 2017 15:02:06 +0000

Not everyone who encrypts data uses a key management solution. Since the days we started worrying about storage of personally identifiable information (PII) we’ve had different methods of protecting it. In a small environment, simple PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) keys were used to manually encrypt data and decrypt it. Storing keys for a few different partners that you routinely exchange data with was simple enough to do. But what about today when we’re storing sensitive data in databases, on storage volumes and in other people’s data centers, like Amazon Web Services. How do we manage numerous keys and make sure that those keys are properly maintained?

Ubiquiti in the Lab

Mon, 06 Feb 2017 15:05:42 +0000

It’s one of those “first world problems” where you have either not enough wireless coverage at home, or you’re getting too much interference from the neighbors to have satisfactory wireless coverage.

I had an Linksys AC3200 providing all of my house’s wireless connectivity and for the most part, it did a good job. I have about twenty-five devices connected to it through wireless and all four of the 1Gbps network jacks filled up as well. Occasionally I found that I needed to restart the router but it was pretty good, no real complaints. However I did have it located in my office which is at the opposite side of my house from my bedroom, which meant some sketchy wireless over the 5Ghz band if working from bed which I did often. I’d have to switch over to the 2.4GHz band and then I was getting interference from neighbors. It was time to try something else. OK sure, I could’ve moved the router closer to the middle of the house, but let’s over engineer the solution instead right?

Are You Proud of What You've Done?

Mon, 30 Jan 2017 15:00:10 +0000

My father was an electrician for over thirty years and has worked on houses, power plants, and manufacturing facilities for most of his life. When travelling around the region near the small town where I grew up, you can see physical structures that my Dad has helped to construct. There must be a certain sense of pride to see something that you built thirty years ago still standing and still being used today.

A VMUG Response - Clearing the Air

Thu, 12 Jan 2017 15:00:03 +0000

Many of you read my previous post about leaders being removed from VMUG for working for vendors that compete with VMware. My call to action was to get a response from VMUG about what was actually happening. I recently received a phone call from VMUG CEO Brad Tompkins to discuss what was actually happening and I’d like to pass on some information to clear the air.

VMUG Leader Status

To get started, yes some leaders were removed from leadership roles in their respective VMUG. And yes, some people will not be allowed to become a VMUG leader based on which company is their employer. What I would like to make clear is that this decision was not made to single out Nutanix. Most of the comments that I saw on twitter were focused on Nutanix employees who had been removed from their local VMUGs. While it’s true that Nutanix is one of these companies, they are not the only one so I want to make it clear that this was not directed solely at Nutanix. This was a decision focused on companies that compete directly with VMware’s products and comes down to a decision about business and competition.

What Capabilities are Needed for a Startup Storage Company?

Tue, 10 Jan 2017 15:00:51 +0000

At this point I assume everyone is tired of hearing about storage arrays. They seem to have saturated the market to the point where the new storage companies have all but evaporated, or got bought by a larger company. Couple that with a focus on moving to public clouds and the storage array seems to have been beaten to death.

While I was at Tech Field Day 12 I had the opportunity to see the folks over at StorageOS present on their fancy new storage solution. I was fully prepared to be lulled to sleep with another storage device but StorageOS had an interesting new take on the storage array. Their solution is to use containers to provide a global namespace to a clustered file system. Having a lightweight 40MB container acting as a controller for your virtual storage array could be an interesting topic all by itself. Off of the top of my head the use cases would include:

I Don't Like it When Mommy and Daddy Fight - VMUG Edition

Sat, 07 Jan 2017 22:26:44 +0000

VMware Users Group (VMUG) has been an important part of my career and an institution that has been close to my heart for many years. I’ve written about my experiences before and served as a leader for several years here in Chicago. Thats why there was some concern when I saw this tweet from Anton Zhbankov last week.

Now, at first this didn’t surprise me too much because there has been a rule that each VMUG chapter is supposed to comprise of more customers than partners as leaders. So, naturally I assumed that this was just fixing an imbalanced VMUG chapter. But as I asked more questions found out that it really was because Anton worked for Nutanix and working at this specific company excludes you from being a VMUG leader. Fellow blogger Matt Crape also wrote a post about this on his site. So now this tweet that had me concerned, has just simply made me sad.

To an Agile New Year

Mon, 02 Jan 2017 15:00:30 +0000

Another year has come and gone. The aspirations that we had for our past trip around the sun have been extinguished and a new set of goals wrapped in confident optimism are on our horizons. For many, the end of the year is used to recharge and take a break from work to celebrate with our families. Now with rejuvenated ambition we can set our backlog of objectives for a new year’s worth of challenges. This post attempts to relate some agile principles used for work in your everyday struggle to meet the new year’s goals.

Unbelievable Gift for the Home Lab

Mon, 19 Dec 2016 15:00:00 +0000

If you follow me on twitter, you’ve probably seen a little bit of back and forth between myself and a Seattle fellow named Jason Langer. Jason and I have known each other for several years now over social media channels due to our similar interests in VMware technologies. I usually run into Jason only once a year at VMworld, but it’s one of these situations where I feel like we chat often enough just because of twitter conversations.

Is Everything Pay-as-You-Go?

Mon, 12 Dec 2016 15:05:29 +0000

A recent vendor product briefing during Tech Field Day 12 got me thinking about the term “pay-as-you-go”. In my line of work, I talk about public cloud a decent amount and maybe I take pay-as-you-go for granted. When I think about this term it means that as soon as I’m done with a resource, I can destroy it and no longer have to pay for it anymore. It also means that I can scale when I need to and just start paying for the new resources as I start consuming them.

Decouple Disks and Compute with DriveScale

Mon, 05 Dec 2016 15:05:15 +0000

I was pretty unsure of the value proposition from DriveScale in the weeks preceding Tech Field Day 12. Maybe the reason is because I’m not a Hadoop expert by any means. They have a pretty interesting idea though, so I wanted to make sure others were clear about what their solution was capable of.

In a virtualized world, we’re pretty familiar with decoupling disks from our storage. It’s done via storage arrays that present iSCSI, Fibre Channel, NFS or whatever. Once we’ve presented a pool of disks to our hypervisor, we can carve up small virtual disks to be used with our virtual machines. In a Hadoop world, we want to have direct access to our drives so that HDFS can manage the storage. For this, we usually have rack mounted pizza box type servers with a certain amount of storage in them and then we can add multiples of them to form a cluster. DriveScale wanted to give HDFS some extra flexibility by allowing a pool of disks to be added, or removed to our servers.

AWS PowerShell Console with XAML

Tue, 29 Nov 2016 15:05:49 +0000

I’ve always liked the idea of taking a series of Microsoft PowerShell scripts and putting them behind a user interface so that I can give the tool to other users. I’m not sure why this idea appeals to me, but probably because it makes me feel like a programmer, if only for a little while. I came across this post by Stephen Owen and I had to try it out.

The project that I picked for this was based on the AWS PowerShell tools that I hadn’t used yet. Let’s face it, this is a good way to check out two different things, I didn’t have much experience with: The AWS PowerShell Tools and XAML for creating GUIs.

Getting Started with vRealize Automation Course

Mon, 28 Nov 2016 15:09:05 +0000

If you’re trying to get started with vRealize Automation and don’t know where to get started, you’re in luck. Pluralsight has just released my course on “Getting Started with vRealize Automation 7”, which will give you a great leg up on your new skills. In this course you’ll learn to install the solution, configure the basics, connect it to your vSphere environment and publish your first blueprints. The course will explain why you’d want to go down the path of using vRA 7 in the first place and how to use the solution.

Unwitting Accomplices in Your Career

Mon, 21 Nov 2016 15:05:14 +0000

It’s the time of year in the United States where we celebrate Thanksgiving. If you’re not familiar with this, it’s a holiday where we give thanks for those things which have blessed us and to take a moment to reflect on all the good things that we have. I recently came home from Tech Field Day 12 and was reflecting how some people have positively affected my career and possibly had no clue what kind of impact they’ve made.

Throw Your Isilon in the Data Lake

Wed, 16 Nov 2016 18:10:59 +0000

Customers have a ton of requirements around log aggregation, file shares, media streaming repositories, and just a simple place to store objects. It can be difficult to manage all of these different use cases but Dell EMC Isilon might just be the solution that can help to manage these requirements. Many times customers have several small islands of storage used for different purposes. Maybe this is because of a brand new requirement like “all security camera data will be stored for seven years”, which might require some additional storage space. Whatever the reason, companies many times will have small islands of storage, possibly even from different storage companies. This can become tough to manage and require more storage administrators with differing skill sets.

Cohesity Provides All of Your Secondary Storage Needs

Tue, 15 Nov 2016 22:08:42 +0000

I was pretty unfamiliar with Cohesity until the recent Tech Field Day 12 presentation but they’ve been receiving a lot of buzz in the industry. If you’re like I was and weren’t paying enough attention, you should at least check them out. Cohesity’s go to market strategy is based around covering all aspects of the secondary storage market. The thought being that there are way too many solutions in use by the enterprise and that all of these different solutions makes it difficult to manage. For example, the secondary storage solutions include media servers, backup managers, target storage for backups, cloud gateways, test/dev storage, file shares for archives and a copy of data for analytics. This is a big task to tackle but the real goal for Cohesity is to replace all of these individual server types into a single scale-out solution.

Tech Field Day 12 Live Stream

Tue, 15 Nov 2016 17:12:38 +0000

Today begins the Gestalt IT Tech Field Day 12 in Palo Alto California. If you’ve been in IT for a while and want to remember what it’s like to be just “keeping up” with the conversation, join in on the live stream which you can watch right here.

Companies presenting include:

Pay attention to these other bloggers on twitter to get their perspective on the solutions presented:

Terraform with Cisco UCS Director

Mon, 07 Nov 2016 15:15:58 +0000

I’m a big fan of Terraform from Hashicorp but many organizations are using cloud management platforms like Cisco UCS Director or vRealize Automation in order to deploy infrastructure. If you read my blog often, you’ll know that I’ve got some experience with both of these products and if you’re looking to get up to speed on either of them, check out one of these links: UCS Director 6 Guide or vRealize Automation 7 Guide. But why not use Terraform with Cisco UCS Director and have the best of both worlds?

UCS Director VMware Management Policy

Wed, 26 Oct 2016 15:24:20 +0000

Cisco UCS Director VMware Management Policy is used to determine how virtual machines will behave and more specifically be cleaned up. In the cloud world, the removal of inactive and unnecessary virtual machines may be more important that the deployment of them. The VM Management Policy is used to configure leases, notifications about when leases expire, and determining when a VM is inactive. This policy is very useful to keep your cloud clean, and removing unneeded virtual machines when they’re past their usefulness.

AWS and VMware, What is Happening Here?

Fri, 14 Oct 2016 15:38:21 +0000

Yesterday it was announced that VMware and Amazon Web Services are partnering to provide vSphere’s hypervisor and toolsets on the AWS platform. Since this time there have been plenty of articles written questioning the motives of both parties involved and whether or not one of these two companies is going to regret this partnership. I invite you to read other perspectives on this and a few of them are listed here: Cloud Opinion, Enrico Signoretti, Frank Denemman (VMware), Jeff Barr (AWS) and there will be more.

A Farewell to VMUG

Mon, 26 Sep 2016 14:10:46 +0000

The Chicago chapter of VMware Users Group had it’s annual conference at the Rosemont Convention Center on Thursday of last week and it was again a success thanks in no small part to the VMUG corporate team. Over six hundred people walked through the doors to experience sponsored sessions, community sessions, keynotes from Kit Colbert and Phoummala Schmidt, as well as plenty of other fun things. This was the fourth official Chicago VMUG Conference that I’ve attended as a member of the leadership team. This was also my final event as a leader. Typically I use this blog as a place to post technical information but in this case I felt that it is important to reflect on the importance of what this group meant to me.

Rubrik Announces Firefly

Tue, 16 Aug 2016 12:00:25 +0000

Today Rubrik announced the release of their latest version of the Rubrik Cloud Data Management (RCDM) operating system and this one has some really neat enhancements. If you’re not familiar with Rubrik, and hate managing backups, then you really should take a closer look at them. Their Cloud Data Management Platform makes managing backups a very simple task. Think Apple’s Time Machine, only for your data center.

The latest version of their operating system is named “Firefly”, instead of having a boring old number distinction like 2.0. I’m told that future versions will also be named in a similar fashion around a bio-luminescence naming scheme. So if you’re not into fireflies, just hang tight for the Angler fish version which I’m speculating will be next.

VMworld 2016 Sessions

Mon, 25 Jul 2016 14:03:45 +0000

It’s about time to head to the US VMworld conference again and this year its in Las Vegas Nevada. VMworld is always a time that is full of excitement for virtualization junkies. Will there be new product announcements that will disrupt the established virtual design principles? Will a new product vendor make a big splash at the event? Can I learn brand new ways to enable my company? All of these questions spread the anticipation for the event.

Guide to Getting Started with Azure

Mon, 18 Jul 2016 15:01:24 +0000

Following the posts in order, this guide should help you to understand and get familiar with Microsoft Azure. This is a guide to getting started with Azure that you can build upon to deploy your own public cloud environment.

Azure Accounts and Subscriptions

Azure Active Directory Integration

Azure Resource Groups

Setup Azure Networks

Azure Network Security Groups

Create Azure VPN Connection

Azure Storage Accounts

Setup Azure PowerShell

Azure Virtual Machine Deployment

Azure Network Interfaces

Azure Cloud Services

Azure Scale Sets

Understanding the Multiple Azure Portals

Using Azure Automation

Microsoft Azure Official Links

Azure Resource Manager Portal - https://portal.azure.com Azure Classic Portal - http://manage.windowsazure.com Microsoft Azure Documentation and Resources - https://azure.microsoft.com

So You Wanna Be a Full Stack Engineer...

Tue, 31 May 2016 14:10:02 +0000

Its a hot buzzword these days and probably on a lot of people’s Linkedin Profile as well. The idea that you are an engineer that knows many things about many different silos of technology. You’re the guy that can break down those walls between storage, networking, servers, cloud and all these specific disciplines. Companies are finding lots of value in these type of engineers who can see the big picture, but just remember there are a few caveats that come with this job function.

Second VCDX Design "Interview" experience

Mon, 16 May 2016 14:05:50 +0000

As some of you may know, I recently obtained the VMware Certified Design Expert - Cloud Management and Automation (VCDX-CMA) certification. This was the second VCDX that I’ve earned, the first of which being in Data Center Virtualization (DCV). This is a pretty difficult process and less than 250 people globally have the distinction of VCDX at this time. There are 4 unique tracks that a VCDX can be earned in, seen below and abbreviated as DCV, EUC, NV, CMA.

Rubrik Gets Serious about Security

Tue, 26 Apr 2016 13:05:01 +0000

Today Rubrik announced not only their new 2.2 code base, but also a brand new appliance that is heavily focused towards environments requiring higher levels of security.

r528 Hybrid Cloud Appliance

Today Rubrik has announced their new r528 Hybrid Cloud appliance that has a serious focus on ensuring that data breaches don’t come from your backup solution. How does it help prevent breaches you might ask? Encrypt everything. First the r528 “brik”, as they call their appliances, encrypts the backups in flight between your vCenter server and the Rubrik appliance. Once the data gets to the appliance, it is placed onto its FIPS 140-2 Level 2 Self Encrypting Drives (SEDs). Its important to note that since Rubrik chose not to do encryption through their Operating System, but rather at the hardware level, there is virtually no performance hit for encryption.

Getting Started with Jenkins Guide

Tue, 19 Apr 2016 14:00:28 +0000

Jenkins is a Continuous Integration / Continuous Development (CI/CD) tool that can be used to deploy code and test it based on a schedule, triggered by a commit in GIT or after other jobs have been completed. Jobs can all be kicked off manually.

The pages below might help you to get familiar with Jenkins and how it could be leveraged in an organization.

Jenkins Installation

Create Jenkins Project

Add Jenkins Nodes

Test PowerCLI Code

Commit Code to GIT to Trigger Job

Use vRealize Automation with Jenkins

Integrate Jenkins with vRealize Code Stream

Custom Made Computer Lab Rack

Mon, 21 Mar 2016 14:23:35 +0000

I had some extra materials left over from a home improvement project I had been working on and decided to put them to use on a custom made rack for my lab. My requirements for the rack design were pretty simple.

Hold my equipment
Make it somewhat portable
Needed to be able to work on the equipment from both the front and the back side
Able to discretely hide cabling

Here is what I came up with. It’s a set of three shelves attached to four posts. The posts in the back are longer because I thought I might add some additional patch paneling in the back. The rack is built on top of casters so I can roll the lab to a different area of my basement if I need to move it’s location for some reason.

Act as If...

Fri, 05 Feb 2016 16:34:02 +0000

I’m often reminded of a scene from the movie “Boiler Room” when I see public spats between employees of competing technologies. Ben Affleck plays a young, wealthy and charismatic salesman who is trying to encourage the firm’s new employees to have a certain swagger about them. He says, “Act as if” and then gives some descriptions of things you can act like, for instance the President of the Firm. His point was that you should have a certain confidence about you that doesn’t need to be explained to people. It exists, it’s there, people know it, and you haven’t said anything to them about it.

Home Lab Expenses

Mon, 04 Jan 2016 15:00:32 +0000

Home Labs aren’t cheap. Depending on what you want to do with your lab, they can even be really expensive. If you’re looking at building one for yourself, you should take some time to determine what you want to get out of it. I’ve found that having a home lab is an incredibly valuable asset to my continuing education and I attribute much of my career success to having one. To me, it’s as essential tool for my career, but for others its a money pit.

What would you say, ya do here...

Mon, 14 Dec 2015 15:15:06 +0000

“So, what do you really do for a living?” This is a pretty common question that I get asked these days. I’ve got a Bachelors degree in Management Information Systems. I also have a VCDX which is some sort of highly desired certification so I must be pretty skilled at whatever it is I do. So what exactly is it?

The truth of the matter is that I have a job in the computer industry and thats about all I can accurately describe to someone who isn’t also in this field. It’s tough to explain virtual servers, Git or VLANs to someone over the course of an elevator ride. You need a certain level of background to understand those concepts.

Software Defined Networking with vRealize Automation and NSX

Mon, 12 Oct 2015 14:30:53 +0000

This is a series of posts helping you get familiarized with how VMware’s vRealize Automation 6 can leverage VMware’s NSX product to provide software defined networking. The series will show you how to do some basic setup of NSX as well as how to use Private, Routed and NAT networks all from within vRA.

vRealize Automation 6 with NSX - NSX Setup

vRealize Automation 6 with NSX - Private Networks

vRealize Automation 6 with NSX - Routed Networks

vRealize Automation 6 with NSX - NAT

vRealize Automation 6 with NSX - Load Balancing

vRealize Automation 6 with NSX - Firewall

VMware Site Recovery Manager 6.1 Announced

Mon, 31 Aug 2015 17:00:52 +0000

VMware announced Site Recovery Manager version 6.1 this week at VMworld in San Francisco California. Several new features were unveiled for VMware’s flagship Disaster Recovery product.

Storage Profile Protection Groups

Remember back in the old days (prior to today), when deploying a new virtual machine we had to ensure the datastore we were putting the virtual machine on was replicated? Not only that, but if this new VM was part of a group of similar VMs that needed to fail over together, we needed to make sure it was in the same protection group? Well VMware decided this was a cumbersome process and added “Storage Profile Protection Groups”.

Linksys AC3200 Review

Mon, 17 Aug 2015 14:05:47 +0000

I ran into that funny problem where if you have so many wireless devices you’re overloading your tiny wireless router that you’ve had for 5 years. After looking around a bit I settled on the AC3200 Triband Router from Linksys. I wanted something that would be really powerful to handle all of my devices and something with a cool factor.

The device arrived and had some simple instructions to configure it. Connect to the default SSID via a wireless device and open up your web browser to myrouter.local to get connected. The setup had a “Quick Setup” mode to get everything running quickly but I found that the quick setup would not work for my environment. The quick setup expects that you’ve connected your Wireless Router directly to a cable modem and in my case I’m connected to a layer three switch behind an ASA firewall. After resetting the router and doing the manual setup though, everything was good.

Straight Forward Convergence with Scale

Mon, 13 Jul 2015 13:50:33 +0000

I have to be honest here, I’d heard of Scale Computing before but never really paid too much attention to them. That is, until I got to see them present at Virtualization Field Day 5 in Boston Massachusetts this year.

All travel expenses and incidentals were paid for by Gestalt IT to attend Virtualization Field Day 5. This was the only compensation given and did not influence the content of this article.

A Dream within a Dream

Wed, 08 Jul 2015 13:33:51 +0000

What can I say? We started building servers on top of servers and it temporarily blew people’s minds. The next logical step is to build a cloud inside a cloud. Ravello Systems is trying to make this process simple and easy. Ravello Systems was kind enough to present at Virtualization Field Day 5 in Boston at the end of June and I’m happy that I was able to participate at a delegate. They presented some really fun technology.

OneCloud to Rule Them All...

Mon, 06 Jul 2015 13:25:24 +0000

Orchestrating a disaster recovery scenario is no simple task. It involves setting up an entirely different data center, figuring out how to manage IP Addresses after a failover, having procedures for users in an outage event and figuring out how to fail back after the disaster is over. Handling orchestrated DR has gotten much easier in the last ten years thanks to virtualization but it’s still not a walk in the park. VMware’s Site Recovery Manager, Zerto and Veeam have dominated this market over the past several years but there is a new kid in town. I got to see OneCloud at Virtualization Field Day 5 and I think they’ve got something worth a first look.

A New Standard for Backups - Rubrik

Mon, 29 Jun 2015 14:32:41 +0000

It’s pretty weird to get excited about backups, but I’ve found myself thinking how cool the new technology that Rubrik’s designing. If you haven’t heard of these guys yet, you will. They presented at Virtualization Field Day 5 in Boston and had some new announcements that will blow your socks right off your feet.

All travel expenses and incidentals were paid for by Gestalt IT to attend Virtualization Field Day 5. This was the only compensation given and did not influence the content of this article.

Will You Put the Data in PernixData?

Thu, 25 Jun 2015 11:52:31 +0000

CTO Satyam Vaghani was kind enough to announce several new products and features relating to the future of PernixData at Virtualization Field Day 5. If you’re not familiar with PernixData, they got their start with their FVP product which provided server side flash for both a read cache or a write-through cache. I’ve used the product several times and it really does some amazing things to smooth out latency and can give your storage array some serious umph!

VMTurbo's Market Economy Got a Free Trade Agreement.

Wed, 24 Jun 2015 15:37:42 +0000

Last year I wrote a post on VMTurbo and its method of using the idea of a market economy to manage your infrastructure. If you need a refresher (or because you didn’t read my blog, shame) take a look here. If you aren’t going to read it, the gist is that VMTurbo monitors your virtual environment and uses the hardware as though it is a supply, and the workloads that run on it as the demand. Based on the demand of a workload and supply of a resource there is a cost associated with the workload, and VMTurbo uses these metrics to determine the most cost effective way to balance these.

Thank you - VCDX 195

Thu, 18 Jun 2015 14:30:19 +0000

I got up this morning to receive news that I had completed the qualifications for the VMware Certified Design Expert certification. This is a group of around 200ish individuals who have completed this exhaustive process which included three exams, submitting an enterprise design and then defending that design in front of a panel of other VCDXs. From the VMware education site:

VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) is the highest level of VMware certification. This elite group is comprised of design architects highly-skilled in VMware enterprise deployments and the program is designed for veteran professionals who want to validate and demonstrate their expertise in VMware technology.

EMC vVNX for your Home Lab

Tue, 12 May 2015 12:57:36 +0000

Last week was packed full of announcements since Microsoft Ignite and EMC World were two large trade shows happening simultaneously. One announcement that excited me was a free virtual storage appliance from EMC. The appliance has the same look and feel of a VNXe but is completely virtual. You know what that means?

If you’re like me, you like to tinker with things in a lab environment so as to not destroy a critical production network. Also, if you happen to write posts on things like VMware Site Recovery Manager, you’ll want to have a storage array that can replicate to a second one. That leaves you with the Netapp Simulator or the HP StoreVirtual appliance unless you want to actually buy two storage arrays. (That ain’t cheap). Well, now we have the EMC vVNX.

Zerto 4 - To Amazon and Beyond

Tue, 05 May 2015 13:00:45 +0000

Zerto has been a great product for companies looking to deploy an easy to use disaster recovery solution. One of the limitations of the product was that it only worked with VMware vSphere, but not any more. Version 4 just dropped and it’s got a myriad of new goodies.

New User Interface
Cross-Replication from vSphere to Microsoft SCVMM and Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Sizing improvements
More Secure Virtual Replication Appliances
vSphere 6 support

The most appealing new capability was the ability to fail over a vSphere environment to Amazon Web Services (AWS). This could save small businesses A LOT of money. Small businesses that have a disaster recovery requirement no longer need to have a dedicated co-lo and spend money on equipment when they may never use it. AWS provides compute, storage and network on an as-needed basis and most of the time, the disaster recovery site is not needed which correlates to savings.

Setup DHCP Relay on HP V1910

Mon, 27 Apr 2015 13:42:52 +0000

Setting up a DHCP relay is a pretty common task that performed by network administrators when setting up a new LAN. If you’re not familiar with a DHCP Relay, take a look at the example below.

In order for a client to get an IP Address from a DHCP Server, it sends out a broadcast once it’s plugged into the network. The broadcast is asking for any servers that are DHCP servers to reply. Remember that a broadcast is a frame that is forwarded to all hosts on a Local Area Network. The DHCP Server will reply and the client will get it’s IP Address.

Thank You

Tue, 07 Apr 2015 13:12:10 +0000

The vSphere-land top virtualization blog voting is now over and theITHollow.com was voted #35 which is up from number forty last year. I wanted to take this opportunity to thank everyone who voted for the site. There are very few rewards for all the time that is spent posting content, but seeing that the hard work is benefiting others, and is useful to the community, are among the top for sure.

Kemp Virtual Load Balancer for Free!

Mon, 16 Mar 2015 14:00:09 +0000

If you’re in the market for a Load Balancer and don’t mind that it’s virtual, check out Kemp’s Virtual Load Balancer. Even better is if you want to try stuff out in your lab because you can get the Virtual Load Balancer for free! There are some limitations, I mean everyone has to make money some how and theres no reason to buy the cow if you get the milk for free, am I right?

Hollow Lab 2015 - Baby Dragon Hybrid Cloud

Mon, 09 Mar 2015 14:00:51 +0000

Many of my daily activities at work now revolve around the idea of a Hybrid Cloud so some of my home lab activities have also followed suit. I realized it had been a while since I wrote up the particulars of my home lab and I’ve added some equipment so this gives me a good opportunity to show some of the upgrades.

Configuration

The environment consists of four physical ESXi hosts that run most of my virtual machines. These servers have three nics that handle all of the virtual machine traffic and the NFS Storage traffic to a pair of Synology NAS devices.

Opvizor

Mon, 02 Mar 2015 15:38:42 +0000

There is a new kid in town when it comes to infrastructure monitoring. Opvizor is a pretty neat little solution for identifying issues in your environment before they become a problem. The install was simple enough, only requiring me to run an installer and connect it to my vCenter Server. Once that was done, it was a matter of clicking a button to scan and upload my data back to Opvizor’s servers (anonymized data of course). These uploads are scheduled to prevent all this manual nonsense, but I couldn’t wait to see what my environment looked like so I uploaded it right away.

Add SSL Certificates to your Synology NAS

Tue, 17 Feb 2015 14:45:47 +0000

You’ve got to be a serious geek to want to install your own SSL Certificates on your home NAS. I mean come on, who really has their own certificate authority sitting around at home and is so annoyed with a little warning page when they access the GUI? Well, since you’ve landed on this page, I assume that I’m in some similar company :)

Login to your Synology NAS and open the control panel. Click Security and then the “Certificates” tab at the top. You’ll notice the subtle “Self-signed certificate” status blazoned in red lettering. Don’t worry, thats what we’re going to fix.

Renew your VCP 5 Certification Now

Mon, 09 Feb 2015 14:15:34 +0000

Amazing news that the latest version of vSphere has been announced. vSphere 6 is now just around the corner from being generally available, but one can assume that the VCP 6 exam is still several weeks away from being available. If you’re like me, your VCP 5 is scheduled to expire in March. AHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Quick, study for an exam that you’ve already taken and passed in the past so that you can keep your certification and then take the VCP 6 which is likely just around the corner.

vCloud Air 2014 Beta Impressions

Tue, 20 Jan 2015 18:53:03 +0000

I got a chance to take a quick peak at the vCloud Air beta during the Early Access Program and wanted to share some of the experience.

I found the solution very simple to use and straight forward, even without needing to look at any install guides or user manuals. The interfaces were very intuitive. Right off the bat, you get to select your virtual Private Cloud region and then create some virtual machines from pre-defined templates. The templates are based on bare bones operating systems templates such as CentOS, Windows 2012 etc and depending on the type of template you choose, a different pricing methodology will be applied. Let’s face it, open source OS’s are free and Windows isn’t. Gotta pay the bills right?

Netgear AC1200 Review

Mon, 12 Jan 2015 14:26:10 +0000

I had one of those serious first world problems where I was intermittently getting poor wireless connectivity from my upstairs bedroom at night. My wireless router is downstairs in my office on the opposite side of the house, and my neighbors’ wireless was also causing some interference. So I was about to get out my chainsaw to start taking out a wall and part of my upstairs floor, when I thought “Maybe a wireless extender would work for me?”

It's not just PURE Storage

Mon, 01 Dec 2014 15:57:58 +0000

Pure Storage presented at Storage Field Day 6 and I had the opportunity to visit their Headquarters for a second time to discuss their technology. I’ve written about “Pure” before after they presented at Virtualizaton Field Day 3 back in February but it was based more around their " Forever Flash" services. This time I was more interested in their architecture and found that their company name “Pure Storage” may be a bit misleading. Everyone knows that they produce arrays that are all SSD and provide tons of IOPS and low latency, blah blah blah. These arrays are far from being just a device full of fast storage. There is a lot of know how based on SSD architecture that has been put into this array to get more out of it than just fast drives.

Highly Available Enterprise Edge Storage from StorMagic

Mon, 24 Nov 2014 14:06:52 +0000

When I saw the Virtual SAN solution from VMware my first thought was that a small office might really love this solution because it eliminated the requirement for a Storage Area Network (SAN) for small offices. Often I would see some small remote offices that have a requirement for a few servers and a bit of highly available storage but this was cost prohibitive for a variety of reasons. Remote offices would need power, cooling and some sort of staff (possibly remote staff) to manage all of these services as well as paying for a shared storage device. Remote office SAN’s are typically a waste since some of these offices really have a very minimal storage footprint, such as less than 5 TB of disk space. It would seem like a waste to by a highly available SAN to house 2TB of data, am I right?

Have VSAN? Want to run NFS on it? Check out Nexenta!

Thu, 20 Nov 2014 15:10:55 +0000

So you just bought VMware Virtual SAN and have stood up your site with some ESXi hosts. When all of a sudden you realize that Virtual SAN is block based and you really needed file based storage. OH NO! What could we do to resolve this situation?

I appears as though Nexenta was looking out for this situation and developed a product called Nexenta Connect for VMware Virtual SAN and they presented it during Storage Field Day 6

Will All New Storage Arrays be Hybrid?

Mon, 17 Nov 2014 14:19:02 +0000

During Storage Field Day 6, I was fortunate enough to get presentation from Andrew Warfield from CohoData about a variety of things. I’ll say a variety mainly because my head is still swimming from all of the concepts that Andy was trying convey. If you don’t believe me, watch the videos and decide for yourself. WARNING!!! BE PREPARED TO PUT YOUR THINKING CAP ON! One of the concepts Andy was talking about was the idea that going forward, all arrays should be hybrid arrays. Immediately, my mind wondered what some of the “All Flash” array vendors would say about this, but he went on to explain this premise in more detail.

Nimble Storage Data Analytics - InfoSight

Mon, 10 Nov 2014 15:00:20 +0000

It’s hard to get too excited about a monitoring system, especially one that’s main focus is to notify a hardware vendor of a problem. However, Nimble Storage has an impressive phone home solution called InfoSight that they are leveraging for more than just fault notifications and opening tickets on failed hardware. This solution is being used for a variety of analytical purposes to both improve their product as well as improve the customer’s experience with their array purchase.

Local Premises Storage for EC2 Provided by Avere Systems

Wed, 05 Nov 2014 20:43:37 +0000

I’ve seen front-end storage systems before and never really been too impressed with them. My primary thoughts about a front-end storage system was this, “My storage array already has a front-end, why do I want to put another layer of abstraction in front of it.” Obviously, there is still a use case for having a single namespace to hide the underlying systems, which might be neat so that a company could use multiple arrays of different types or even vendors and have a single place to go to access that storage. For the most part, I still think that this is a luxury that many companies can’t justify since some extra time spent by the infrastructure team will do the job.

VMware Appliance Console Certificates

Mon, 27 Oct 2014 13:01:33 +0000

During a recent install, I got stuck on an issue (or so I thought) assigning an SSL Certificate to some of the vRealize Automation Appliances. I went through all of the installation procedures and the appliance stated “SSL Certificate Installed Successfully”, but when I went to the appliance, the certificate still showed the default VMware certificate.

You can see when I go to the appliance, I was getting a warning on the SSL Certificate.