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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. ...

vRealize Automation has had a different upgrade process for about every version that I can think of. The upgrade from vRA 7.1 to 7.2 is no exception, but this time you can see that some good things are happening to this process. There are fewer manual steps to do to make sure the upgrade goes smoothly and a script is now used to upgrade the IaaS Components which is a nice change from the older methods. As with any upgrade, you should read all of the instructions in the official documentation before proceeding. ...

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: ...

Creating a Cisco UCS Director Catalog is a critical step because it’s what your end users will request new virtual machines and services from. There are a couple types of catalogs that will deploy virtual machines, advanced and standard. Standard selects a virtual machine template from vSphere. Advanced selects a pre-defined workflow that has been built in UCSD and then published to the catalog. Create a Standard Catalog To create a “standard” object go to the Policies drop down and select catalogs. From there click “Add”. Select a catalog type and then click “Submit”. In this example, I’ve chosen the “Standard” catalog type. ...

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? ...

Creating a Cisco UCS Director Catalog is the first step to publishing services to your end users. The second step is to assign permissions. This post will show you how to assign permissions to UCS Director Catalogs. To allow users to access a catalog item they must be granted permissions. To do this, go to the Administration drop down –> Users and Groups. From there click on the “User Groups” tab and find the group which should be entitled. ...

The Cisco UCS Director end user self-service policy is used to determine which day 2 operations that come out of the box are available on catalogs in a VDC. By “day 2” I mean the types of operations that can be performed on a virtual machine after its been deployed, such as reboot, power on, snapshot, etc. To configure these, go to the Policies drop down and select Virtual/Hypervisor Policies –> Service Delivery. Then select the “End User Self-Service Policy” and click the Add button. ...