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Recently, I’ve been going through and updating my lab so that I’m all up to date with the latest technology. As part of this process, I’ve updated my certificates so that all of my URLs have the nice trusted green logo on them. Oh yeah, and because it’s more secure. I updated my vSphere lab to version 6.5 and moved to the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) as part of my updates. However, after I replaced the default self-signed certificates I had a few new problems. Specifically, after the update, NSX wouldn’t connect to the lookup service. This is particularly annoying because as I found out later, if I’d have just left my self-signed certificates in tact, I would never have had to deal with this. I thought that I was doing the right thing for security, but VMware made it more painful for me to do the right thing. I’m hoping this gets more focus soon from VMware. ...

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. ...

Many cloud initiatives require having a portal for users to choose which workloads can be deployed. Think of this as a supermarket full of servers, networks, databases, or all of the above. There are product offerings from VMware, Cisco, RightScale and Redhat, used for these deployment methodologies. If you’re an AWS customer though, you’ve got your own catalog available from the native AWS tools called the “Service Catalog” service. This service enables you to deploy and publish CloudFormation templates for your users so that they don’t have to know how RDS, or EC2 instances work. They can select from the catalog and deploy anything you can build in an Amazon CFT. Think of the possibilities. ...

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: ...

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? ...

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? ...

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. ...

Cisco UCS Director Catalog Requests are the entire reason for having a cloud management platform in the first place. It’s the end user’s store for where they can request machines and services. To request a service, login to the UCS Director Portal with an account that has the “Service End-User” role. This role provides a different portal when logging in that only shows the user’s orders and catalogs and removes all of the administration options. ...

This year at AWS re:Invent Amazon announced a new service called Step Functions. According to AWS, Step Functions is an easy way to coordinate the components of distributed applications and microservices using visual workflows. That pretty much sums it up! When you’ve got a series of small microservices that need to be coordinated, it can be tricky to write this code into each lambda function to call the next function. Step Functions gives you a visual editor to manage the calls to multiple Lambda functions to make your life easier. I’ve written about this before on the AHEAD blog. ...

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. ...