Recently-Added

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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: Cohesity Dell EMC Docker Drive Scale Igneous Rubrik StorageOS Pay attention to these other bloggers on twitter to get their perspective on the solutions presented: ...

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? ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...