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UCS Director is a cloud management platform and thus requires some infrastructure to deploy the orchestrated workloads. In many cases UCS Director can also orchestrate the configuration and deployment of bare metal or hardware as well, such as configuring new VLANs on switches, deploying operating systems on blades and setting hardware profiles etc. This post focuses on getting those devices to show up in UCS Director so that additional automation can be performed. ...

The basic deployment of UCS Director consists of deploying an OVF file that is available from the Cisco downloads site. This post won’t go through the deployment of the OVF but this should be a pretty simple setup. The deployment will ask for IP Addressing information and some passwords. Complete the deployment of the OVF in your virtual environment and then continue with this post. Once the OVF has been deployed, open a web browser and place the IP Address of the appliance in the address bar. ...

Cisco UCS Director utilizes the idea of a Virtual Data Center (VDC) to determine how and where virtual machine should be placed. This includes which clusters to deploy to, networks to use, datastores to live on, as well as the guest customization and cost models that will be used for those virtual machines. According to the UCS Director Administration Guide, a Virtual Data Center is “a logical grouping that combines virtual resources, operational details, rules, and policies to manage specific group requirements”. Cisco UCS Director VDCs are the focal point of a virtual machine deployment. ...

One of the new features of vRealize Automation in version 7.1 is the ability to scale out or scale in your servers. This sort of scaling is a horizontal scaling of the number of servers. For instance, if you had deployed a single web server, you can scale out to two, three etc. When you scale in, you can go from four servers to three and so on. Use Cases The use cases here could really vary widely. The easiest to get started with would be some sort of a web / database deployment where the web servers have some static front end web pages and can be deployed over and over again with the same configurations. If we were to place the web servers behind a load balancer (yep, think NSX here for you vSphere junkies) then your web applications can be scaled horizontally based on when you run out of resources. ...

Azure scale sets are a way to horizontally increase or decrease resources for your applications. Wouldn’t it be nice to provision a pair of web servers behind a load balancer, and then add a third or fourth web server once the load hit 75% of capacity? Even better, when the load on those web servers settles down, they could be removed to save you money? This is what an Azure scale set does. Think of the great uses for this; seasonal demand for a shopping site, event promotions that cause a short spike in traffic, or even end of the month data processing tasks could automatically scale out to meet the demand and then scale in to save money when not needed. ...

The Chicago chapter of VMware Users Group had it’s annual conference at the Rosemont Convention Center on Thursday of last week and it was again a success thanks in no small part to the VMUG corporate team. Over six hundred people walked through the doors to experience sponsored sessions, community sessions, keynotes from Kit Colbert and Phoummala Schmidt, as well as plenty of other fun things. This was the fourth official Chicago VMUG Conference that I’ve attended as a member of the leadership team. This was also my final event as a leader. Typically I use this blog as a place to post technical information but in this case I felt that it is important to reflect on the importance of what this group meant to me. ...

Microsoft Azure has a neat way to store and run code right from within Microsoft Azure called “Azure Automation”. If you’re familiar with Amazon’s Lambda service, Azure Automation is similar in many ways. The main difference is that in Azure, we’re working with PowerShell code instead of Python or Node.js. Create An Azure Automation Account To get started, the first thing that we need to do is to setup an Azure Automation Account. In your Azure instance, browse for “Automation Accounts” and then click Add. Give the account a name and a subscription that the PowerShell commands should run under. As with any Azure objects, select a resource group or create your own and then select a location. The last setting is to decide whether or not the account with be an “Azure Run As” account. If you select “Yes” then the account will have access to other Azure Resources within your instance. For our examples, this account should be a “run as” account. ...

If you’re getting started with Microsoft Azure, you may feel confused about where things are located. One of the reasons for this confusion is the current use of multiple portals. It’s hard enough to learn how subscriptions work, how to access the resources through PowerShell and all of those new concepts without having to navigate different sites. This post should shed some light on what the portals are and how they’re used. ...

Azure provides a Platform-as-a-Service offering called a “Cloud Service.” Instead of managing every part of a virtual machine (the middle-wear and the application) it might be desirable to only worry about the application that is being deployed. An Azure cloud service allows you to just focus on the app, but does give you access to the underlying virtual machine if you need to use it. So what makes up an Azure Cloud Service? There are two main types of virtual machines that are deployed through a cloud service; web roles and worker roles. Web roles are Windows servers with IIS installed and ready to use on them. Worker roles are Windows servers without IIS installed. In addition to the Windows instances that will be deployed, a cloud service also includes a load balancer that will automatically load balance the web roles, and an IP Address will be assigned to the load balancer. One thing to note is that the web server roles have an agent installed on them as well so that the load balancer can determine if the server is working correctly and if it needs to remove a server from the load balancer. ...

Azure allows you to manage network interfaces as an object that can be decoupled from the virtual machine. This is important to note, because when you delete your virtual machine, the Network Interface will still be in the Azure Portal. This NIC and all of it’s settings will still exist for reuse if you wish. This would include keeping the Public IP Address that is associated with it, subnets, and Network Security Groups. ...