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If you do a lot of work with orchestration, you’re almost certain to be familiar with working with a REST API. These REST APIs have become the primary way that different systems can interact with each other. How about database operations? How about the ability to use a generic database to house CMDB data, change tracking or really anything you can think of. I came across a nifty program called DreamFactory that allows us to add an API to our databases. The examples in this post are all around MS SQL Server, but it also has support for PostgreSQL, NO SQL, SQL Lite, DB2, Salesforce and even Active Directory or LDAP. ...

Its a hot buzzword these days and probably on a lot of people’s Linkedin Profile as well. The idea that you are an engineer that knows many things about many different silos of technology. You’re the guy that can break down those walls between storage, networking, servers, cloud and all these specific disciplines. Companies are finding lots of value in these type of engineers who can see the big picture, but just remember there are a few caveats that come with this job function. ...

vRealize Code Stream now comes pre-packaged with JFrog Artifactory which allows us to do some cool things while we’re testing and deploying new code. To begin this post, lets take a look at what an artifactory is and how we can use it. An artifactory is a version control repository, typically used for binary objects like .jar files. You might already be thinking, how is this different from GIT? My Github account already has repos and does its own version control. True, but what if we don’t want to pull down an entire repo to do work? Maybe we only need a single file of a build or we want to be able to pull down different versions of the same file without creating branches, forks, additional repos or committing new code? This is where an artifactory service can really shine. ...

As some of you may know, I recently obtained the VMware Certified Design Expert - Cloud Management and Automation (VCDX-CMA) certification. This was the second VCDX that I’ve earned, the first of which being in Data Center Virtualization (DCV). This is a pretty difficult process and less than 250 people globally have the distinction of VCDX at this time. There are 4 unique tracks that a VCDX can be earned in, seen below and abbreviated as DCV, EUC, NV, CMA. ...

By now, we’re probably Jenkins experts. So lets see how we can use Jenkins with vRealize Code Stream. To give you a little background, vRealize Code Stream is a release automation solution that can be added to VMware’s vRealize Automation solution. It’s a nifty little tool that will let us deploy a server from blueprint, call some Jenkins jobs and deploy code from an artifactory repository. One of the best features is that you can build your release in stages and have gating rules between them so you can automate going from Development to UAT to Production or whatever else you can think of. ...

If you’ve been following the rest of this series about using Jenkins, you’re starting to see that there are a lot of capabilities that can be used to suit whatever use case you have for deploying and testing code. This post focuses on a great plugin that was recently pushed out by Kris Thieler (aka inkysea) and Paul Gifford. These guys have published a Jenkins Plugin for vRealize Automation. Just like we’ve done in other posts, the first step is to install the plugin in the Manage Plugins section of Jenkins. ...

Today Rubrik announced not only their new 2.2 code base, but also a brand new appliance that is heavily focused towards environments requiring higher levels of security. r528 Hybrid Cloud Appliance Today Rubrik has announced their new r528 Hybrid Cloud appliance that has a serious focus on ensuring that data breaches don’t come from your backup solution. How does it help prevent breaches you might ask? Encrypt everything. First the r528 “brik”, as they call their appliances, encrypts the backups in flight between your vCenter server and the Rubrik appliance. Once the data gets to the appliance, it is placed onto its FIPS 140-2 Level 2 Self Encrypting Drives (SEDs). Its important to note that since Rubrik chose not to do encryption through their Operating System, but rather at the hardware level, there is virtually no performance hit for encryption. ...

in previous posts we discussed how you can use Jenkins to test various pieces of code including Powershell. Jenkins is a neat way to test your code and have a log of the successes and failures but let’s face it, you were probably testing your code as you were writing it anyway right? Well, what if you could push your code to GIT and have that code tested each time a GIT push was executed? Then you can have several people working on the same code and when the code gets updated in your repositories, it will be tested and logged. This makes it really nice to see when the code stopped working and who published the code to GIT. Now we’re really starting to see the power of this CI/CD stuff. ...

Jenkins is a Continuous Integration / Continuous Development (CI/CD) tool that can be used to deploy code and test it based on a schedule, triggered by a commit in GIT or after other jobs have been completed. Jobs can all be kicked off manually. The pages below might help you to get familiar with Jenkins and how it could be leveraged in an organization. Jenkins Installation Create Jenkins Project Add Jenkins Nodes Test PowerCLI Code Commit Code to GIT to Trigger Job Use vRealize Automation with Jenkins Integrate Jenkins with vRealize Code Stream

In the previous post we discuss how to setup a Windows Node to test PowerShell code. In this post, we’ll configure a new Jenkins project to test some very basic PowerCLI code. To start, we need to have some basics setup on our Windows Node that we setup previously as a slave. In our case, we need to make sure that we have PowerCLI installed on the host. Let’s think about this logically for a second. Jenkins is going to tell our Windows node to execute some PowerCLI scripts as a test. If the Windows node doesn’t understand PowerCLI, then our tests just won’t work. I would suggest that you install PowerCLI on your Windows node and then do a quick test to make sure you can connect to your vCenter server. ...