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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. ...

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. ...

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 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. ...

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 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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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