Posts

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. ...

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. ...