Posts

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. ...

Amazon’s S3 is a cost effective way to store file but many organizations are used to mapping NFS shares to machines for file storage purposes. Amazon Storage Gateways are a good way to cache or store files on an NFS mount and then back them up to an S3 bucket. This post goes through the setup of an AWS Storage Gateway in an EC2 instance for caching files and storing them in an S3 bucket. This same solution (and a similar but different process) can be used to mount block devices through iSCSI or setup a Tape Gateway for backup products. ...

Preventing blueprint sprawl should be a consideration if you’re building out a new cloud through vRealize Automation. Too many blueprints and your users will be confused by the offerings and the more blueprints, the more maintenance needed to manage them. We’ve had custom methods for managing sprawl up until vRA 7.3 was released. Now we have some slick new methods right out of the box to cut down on the number of blueprints in use. These new out of the box configurations are called Component Profiles. ...

vRealize Automation version 7.3 dropped a few weeks ago and you’re really excited about the new improvements that have been made with the platform. Release Notes for version 7.3 You’ve gone through the upgrade process which is constantly improving I might add but once you log in you find out that your endpoints that you spent so much time building are now missing. Kind of like the ones in my screenshot below. ...

vRA is great at deploying servers in an automated fashion, but to really use the built in functionality for an organization some additional information should be requested to properly place the workloads in the environment. This post covers how to ask users for the correct information to properly determine the placement location of new server workloads. Cluster Placement The first placement decision that needs to be made is which cluster the workload should be placed on. This can be done with reservations and reservation policies but often comes with some blueprint sprawl. We’d like to be able to ask the requester which environment the workload should be placed on. To specify a cluster (which could include a cluster on a different vCenter or datacenter) we’ll modify an xml document stored in the IaaS Server(s) which will describe our datacenters. In my example I’ve got two clusters in a single vCenter named “Management” and “Workload”. My clusters are shown below. ...

It’s a pretty common design request these days to have a single authentication source. I mean, do you really want to have to manage a bunch of different logins instead of having to remember one? Also, five different accounts give attackers five different avenues to try to exploit. So many times we use our existing Active Directory infrastructure as our single source of authentication. Amazon Web Services (AWS) needs a way for people to login and will allow you to use your own Active Directory credentials through Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML). This post will walk you through the setup of Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) on Windows Server 2016 and configuring it to be your credentials for AWS. ...

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