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I got up this morning to receive news that I had completed the qualifications for the VMware Certified Design Expert certification. This is a group of around 200ish individuals who have completed this exhaustive process which included three exams, submitting an enterprise design and then defending that design in front of a panel of other VCDXs. From the VMware education site: VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) is the highest level of VMware certification. This elite group is comprised of design architects highly-skilled in VMware enterprise deployments and the program is designed for veteran professionals who want to validate and demonstrate their expertise in VMware technology. ...

In order to deploy a fully provisioned automated deployment of a server we have to look past just deploying a virtual machine OS and configuring an IP Address. In order to get something usable we also need to configure the server with some applications or make post provisioning changes. For instance we might want to install Apache after deploying a Linux machine. In vRealize Automation deployments invoke a post-provisioning stub to call vRealize Orchestrator workflows to make additional changes. This works very well on a vSphere environment since we can leverage VMtools to access the guest OS. But if you’ve ever deployed an instance in Amazon EC2 you’ll know that this isn’t quite as easy. EC2 instances don’t have VMTools to allow us into the guest OS. To make matters worse, the current version of vRealize Automation doesn’t pass the IP address of the guest Operating System to vRO. See this KB article from VMware for more information. ...

It may be necessary to connect to a Linux Guest thats that been provisioned in Amazon Web Services so that you can perform additional operations on it. One of the ways you might want to configure your instances is through vRealize Orchestrator. One of the hang ups with using vRealize Orchestrator to connect to your Linux EC2 instances is that you’ll need an SSH key to connect. This post shows you how you can do this. ...

OK, I know that most of the known world is all of a sudden working on making everything scriptable so that it can be automated or just run from a command line, but come on we still use the GUI for some quick tasks don’t we? One of the cool things about the vSphere Web Client is its ability to create a custom search based on a set of criteria. Just to recap, I said there was a cool feature of the vSphere Web Client. ...

Have you ever tried logging into vRealize Automation and gotten an Incorrect username/password but you’re positive you typed everything in correctly? You try again and find out that if you put the User Principal Name suffix everything works fine. If you’re using a solution like vRealize Automation and notice the login doesn’t work unless you specify a a User Principle Name (UPN) in the form of [email protected], try the following correction. ...

Last week was packed full of announcements since Microsoft Ignite and EMC World were two large trade shows happening simultaneously. One announcement that excited me was a free virtual storage appliance from EMC. The appliance has the same look and feel of a VNXe but is completely virtual. You know what that means? If you’re like me, you like to tinker with things in a lab environment so as to not destroy a critical production network. Also, if you happen to write posts on things like VMware Site Recovery Manager, you’ll want to have a storage array that can replicate to a second one. That leaves you with the Netapp Simulator or the HP StoreVirtual appliance unless you want to actually buy two storage arrays. (That ain’t cheap). Well, now we have the EMC vVNX. ...

Zerto has been a great product for companies looking to deploy an easy to use disaster recovery solution. One of the limitations of the product was that it only worked with VMware vSphere, but not any more. Version 4 just dropped and it’s got a myriad of new goodies. New User Interface Cross-Replication from vSphere to Microsoft SCVMM and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Sizing improvements More Secure Virtual Replication Appliances vSphere 6 support The most appealing new capability was the ability to fail over a vSphere environment to Amazon Web Services (AWS). This could save small businesses A LOT of money. Small businesses that have a disaster recovery requirement no longer need to have a dedicated co-lo and spend money on equipment when they may never use it. AWS provides compute, storage and network on an as-needed basis and most of the time, the disaster recovery site is not needed which correlates to savings. ...

Setting up a DHCP relay is a pretty common task that performed by network administrators when setting up a new LAN. If you’re not familiar with a DHCP Relay, take a look at the example below. In order for a client to get an IP Address from a DHCP Server, it sends out a broadcast once it’s plugged into the network. The broadcast is asking for any servers that are DHCP servers to reply. Remember that a broadcast is a frame that is forwarded to all hosts on a Local Area Network. The DHCP Server will reply and the client will get it’s IP Address. ...

If you’re planning on doing a full distributed installation of vRealize Automation, you’ll likely want to have some protection for the vPostgres database. Having a single point of failure defeats the purpose of doing a full distributed install. I’ve been doing a bunch of work on this lately and wanted to warn people of a gotcha if you’re using a load balancer. Non-Distributed Install To give us a better understanding, take a look at a pair of vRealize Automation Appliances that aren’t in a high availability solution. In the picture below, there are two vRealize Automation Appliances and each of them is communicating with their own embedded vPostgres Database. This is the default configuration when deployed from VMware and works just fine. ...

Clustering the vPostgres database is an important part of a fully distributed vRealize Automation install. The simple install only requires a single vRealize Appliance and an IaaS Server, but the fully distributed install requires many additional pieces including load balancers to ensure both high availability as well as handling extra load placed by users. The vPostgres database is included with the vRealize Automation appliances, but for a full distributed install, these must be modified so that there is an active and standby vPostgres database running on them. The primary vPostgres database will replicate to a standby read-only database. ...