It’s about time to head to the US VMworld conference again and this year its in Las Vegas Nevada. VMworld is always a time that is full of excitement for virtualization junkies. Will there be new product announcements that will disrupt the established virtual design principles? Will a new product vendor make a big splash at the event? Can I learn brand new ways to enable my company? All of these questions spread the anticipation for the event. ...
I was asked to provide the PowerPoint deck used in the 2016 Indianapolis VMUG Conference Keynote. If you are interested in this presentation, it can be found here. Indy-Keynote v6
Following the posts in order, this guide should help you to understand and get familiar with Microsoft Azure. This is a guide to getting started with Azure that you can build upon to deploy your own public cloud environment. Azure Accounts and Subscriptions Azure Active Directory Integration Azure Resource Groups Setup Azure Networks Azure Network Security Groups Create Azure VPN Connection Azure Storage Accounts Setup Azure PowerShell Azure Virtual Machine Deployment Azure Network Interfaces Azure Cloud Services Azure Scale Sets Understanding the Multiple Azure Portals Using Azure Automation Microsoft Azure Official Links Azure Resource Manager Portal - https://portal.azure.com Azure Classic Portal - http://manage.windowsazure.com Microsoft Azure Documentation and Resources - https://azure.microsoft.com ...
An Azure resource group is a way for you to, you guessed it, group a set of resources together. This is a useful capability in a public cloud so that you can manage permissions, set alerts, built deployment templates and audit logs on a subset of resources. Resource groups can contain, virtual machines, gateways, VNets, VPNs and about any other resource Azure can deploy. Most items that you create will need to belong to a resource group but an item can only belong to a single resource group at a time. Resources can be moved from one resource group to another. ...
Azure is a great reservoir of resources that your organization can use to deploy applications upon and the cloud is focused around pooling resources together. However, organizations need to be able to split resources up based on cost centers. The development team will be using resources for building new apps, as well as maybe an e-commerce team for production uses. Subscriptions allow for a single Azure instance to separate these costs, and bill to different teams. ...
Join me on July 20th in Indianapolis Indiana for a day of fun and learning at the annual Indianapolis VMware Users Group Conference! For those of you not familiar with VMUG, its an independent customer-led organization created to maximize members’ use of VMware and partner solutions through knowledge sharing, training, collaboration and events. VMUG is the largest organization worldwide focused on virtualization users. Don’t worry if you just want the day off from work, that’s just one of the benefits, but BE SURE TO REGISTER FOR FREE HERE: https://www.vmug.com/p/cm/ld/fid=13570 ...
vRealize Automation lets us publish vRealize Orchestrator workflows to the service catalog, but to get more functionality out of these XaaS blueprints, we can add the provisioned resources to the items list. This allows us to manage the lifecycle of these items and even perform secondary “Day 2 Operations” on these items later. For the example in this post, we’ll be provisioning an AWS Security group in an existing VPC. For now, just remember that AWS Security groups are not managed by vRA, but with some custom work, this is all about to change. ...
The cloud doesn’t need to be a total shift to the way you manage your infrastructure. Sure, it has many differences, but you don’t have to redo everything just to provision cloud workloads. One thing you’ll probably want to do is connect your Active Directory Domain to your cloud provider so that you can continue to administer one group of users. Face it, you’re not going to create a user account in AD, then one in Amazon and then another one in Azure. You want to be able to manage one account and have it affect everything. Microsoft Azure allows you to extend your on-prem domain to the Azure portal. This post focuses on the AD Connector and doing a sync. ...
If you’re brand new to Ansible but have some vRealize Automation and Orchestration experience, this post will get you started with a configuration management tool. The goal in this example is to deploy a CentOS server from vRealize Automation and then have Ansible configure Apache and deploy a web page. It assumes that you have no Ansible server setup, but do have a working vRealize Automation instance. If you need help with setting up vRealize Automation 7 take a look at the guide here. ...
The number of clusters that should be used for a vSphere environment comes up for every vSphere design. The number of clusters that should be used isn’t a standard number and should be evaluated based on several factors. Number of Hosts Let’s start with the basics, if the design calls for more virtual machines than can fit into a single cluster, then it’s obvious that multiple clusters must be used. The same is true for a design that calls for more hosts that can fit into a single cluster or any other cluster maximums. ...