Posts

What’s this REST thing everyone keeps talking about? “Oh, don’t worry, we have a REST API.” or “It’s just a simple REST call.” At one point I was hearing these phrases and would get very frustrated. If REST is so commonplace or so simple to use, then why did I not know how to do it? If this sounds like you, then keep reading. I work for a company called “Ahead” as a consultant and they recently got a Rubrik Hybrid Cloud Appliance in their lab but my colleague Nick Colyer and I noticed that they didn’t have any vRealize Orchestrator Plugins for it. We decided to build these on our own, with the help of Chris Wahl and publish them for the community to use. ...

What’s this REST thing everyone keeps talking about? “Oh, don’t worry, we have a REST API.” or “It’s just a simple REST call.” At one point I was hearing these phrases and would get very frustrated. If REST is so commonplace or so simple to use, then why did I not know how to do it? If this sounds like you, then keep reading. I work for a company called “Ahead” as a consultant and they recently got a Rubrik Hybrid Cloud Appliance in their lab but my colleague Nick Colyer and I noticed that they didn’t have any vRealize Orchestrator Plugins for it. We decided to build these on our own, with the help of Chris Wahl and publish them for the community to use. ...

I ran into that funny problem where if you have so many wireless devices you’re overloading your tiny wireless router that you’ve had for 5 years. After looking around a bit I settled on the AC3200 Triband Router from Linksys. I wanted something that would be really powerful to handle all of my devices and something with a cool factor. The device arrived and had some simple instructions to configure it. Connect to the default SSID via a wireless device and open up your web browser to myrouter.local to get connected. The setup had a “Quick Setup” mode to get everything running quickly but I found that the quick setup would not work for my environment. The quick setup expects that you’ve connected your Wireless Router directly to a cable modem and in my case I’m connected to a layer three switch behind an ASA firewall. After resetting the router and doing the manual setup though, everything was good. ...

When you execute a Cisco UCS Director workflow you’re usually prompted to enter in some information. Usually this is something like a virtual machine name, or an IP Address, even some credentials possibly. The values that you enter can be formatted so that they come from a list and the user just has to select the right value. This helps immensely in the amount of troubleshooting you have to do because only specific verified values can be displayed. ...

Infoblox is a pretty popular IP Address Management (IPAM) solution for many shops. Wouldn’t it be nice to integrate your automation solution such as vRealize Automation, with your existing IPAM system? Well, don’t worry. You can! Infoblox Setup This post isn’t going to go into great detail about the setup of the Infoblox appliance but we do need to make sure that we’re licensed for API usage correctly. Ensure that the infoblox appliance has the “Cloud Network Automation” license applied to it. This is an easy thing to check. If your appliance has the “Cloud” tab, then the license is enabled. ...

Cisco UCS Director gives us some great automation and orchestration capabilities in the product. One thing I’ve noticed though is the need to customize the actions that can performed on virtual machines after deployment (Sometimes called Day 2 Operations). This post explains how to make some custom buttons for end users to manage their workloads more effectively. Create Workflow Creating a workflow is out of the scope of this post, but we need to have a workflow to use for our examples. I’ve created a very simple workflow to create a VM Snapshot and email the user when it happens. To create your own workflow Go to Policies –> Orchestration –> Workflows to get started. ...

Long is the way and hard, that out of hell leads up to light - Milton Apparently, Milton has been through the VCDX process. It is a challenge that will test your resolve and you will probably learn a lot along the way. You’ll also be glad when its over. I’ve been good at many things in my life, but never felt like I was great at anything. I’ve succeeded at most things I’ve attempted, but the VCDX was a goal I truly didn’t think I was capable of achieving. Chris Colotti mentioned in one of his posts that you need to decide why you’re going for the VCDX in the first place. In my case, I was doing it to prove to myself that I could do it. The process really taught me something about myself that I didn’t know. It was my own personal Vision Quest. (Queue Lunatic Fringe them song here) ...

I have to be honest here, I’d heard of Scale Computing before but never really paid too much attention to them. That is, until I got to see them present at Virtualization Field Day 5 in Boston Massachusetts this year. All travel expenses and incidentals were paid for by Gestalt IT to attend Virtualization Field Day 5. This was the only compensation given and did not influence the content of this article. ...

What can I say? We started building servers on top of servers and it temporarily blew people’s minds. The next logical step is to build a cloud inside a cloud. Ravello Systems is trying to make this process simple and easy. Ravello Systems was kind enough to present at Virtualization Field Day 5 in Boston at the end of June and I’m happy that I was able to participate at a delegate. They presented some really fun technology. ...

Orchestrating a disaster recovery scenario is no simple task. It involves setting up an entirely different data center, figuring out how to manage IP Addresses after a failover, having procedures for users in an outage event and figuring out how to fail back after the disaster is over. Handling orchestrated DR has gotten much easier in the last ten years thanks to virtualization but it’s still not a walk in the park. VMware’s Site Recovery Manager, Zerto and Veeam have dominated this market over the past several years but there is a new kid in town. I got to see OneCloud at Virtualization Field Day 5 and I think they’ve got something worth a first look. ...