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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. ...

Not all of your Jenkins projects will consist of “Hello World” type routines. What if we want to run some PowerShell jobs? Or better yet, PowerCLI? Our Jenkins instance was built on CentOS and doesn’t run Windows PowerShell very well at all. Luckily for us, in situations like this, we can add additional Jenkins nodes and yes they can also be Windows hosts! Login to your Jenkins Instance and go to Manage Jenkins and then click on Manage Nodes. ...

In this post we’ll create a Jenkins project on our brand new shiny server that we just deployed. The project we create will be very simple but should show off the possibilities of using a Jenkins server to test your code. To get started login to your Jenkins server at the http://jenkinsservername:8080 port and then click the “New Item” link. From there give your new project a name. In this example our project is a Freestyle project which will let us throw code right into the project and run it on the Jenkins server or subsequent Jenkins Nodes. ...

Installing a Jenkins instance is pretty simple if you’re a Linux guy. But even if you’re not a Linux admin, this isn’t going to make you sweat too much. First, start by deploying yourself a Linux instance. The OS version in this post is based on CentOS 7 if you are interested in following along. Once you’re up and running, make sure you can ping into the box and have SSH access. If you’re new to this, you can find instructions on setting up an SSH daemon here. Now that it’s setup we can install Jenkins by running the following commands. ...