Posts

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. ...

It’s pretty weird to get excited about backups, but I’ve found myself thinking how cool the new technology that Rubrik’s designing. If you haven’t heard of these guys yet, you will. They presented at Virtualization Field Day 5 in Boston and had some new announcements that will blow your socks right off your feet. 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. ...

CTO Satyam Vaghani was kind enough to announce several new products and features relating to the future of PernixData at Virtualization Field Day 5. If you’re not familiar with PernixData, they got their start with their FVP product which provided server side flash for both a read cache or a write-through cache. I’ve used the product several times and it really does some amazing things to smooth out latency and can give your storage array some serious umph! ...

Last year I wrote a post on VMTurbo and its method of using the idea of a market economy to manage your infrastructure. If you need a refresher (or because you didn’t read my blog, shame) take a look here. If you aren’t going to read it, the gist is that VMTurbo monitors your virtual environment and uses the hardware as though it is a supply, and the workloads that run on it as the demand. Based on the demand of a workload and supply of a resource there is a cost associated with the workload, and VMTurbo uses these metrics to determine the most cost effective way to balance these. ...

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. ...