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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. ...

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. ...

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

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. ...

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 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. ...

“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. ...

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 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”. ...

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. ...