I recently had to rebuild part of my home lab due to a very poor decision to host all of my nested ESXi hosts on a single SSD. Kids, Do NOT do that at home! Obviously this is a lab and budget was a constraint, but it was a bummer when my SSD finally failed. It might be useful to review some steps used to build ESXi Servers inside VMware Workstation. Especially since Workstation 10 can clone ESXi which makes things much quicker. ...
When I work with smaller sized customers, I often hear that they don’t have any networking monitoring software available. Usually there is some server monitoring there, and something that pings network devices, but nothing that can display how much bandwidth is being used, and when. If you are in this situation, I implore you to check out PRTG monitor from Paessler. This is a great piece of software, that can do much more than monitor your Internet bandwidth, but that’s what I use it the most for. There is a full version, but the free version will allow you to monitor up to 10 ports which is plenty if you’re just monitoring your WAN, or a few ports like your ESXi hosts in your home lab! ...
I never thought that I’d be writing this post, but the day has come where I decided to switch to an Apple laptop. If you’ve known me, you were probably aware of my disdain for Apple products. I was of the opinion that they are offering the same equipment with a higher price tag and people who purchased that stuff were suckers. So now, either I’ve been snookered into this mass hysteria of Mac Madness, or things aren’t really how I originally thought. ...
I just bought two new 27 inch (yeah, they’re large) monitors for my home office thanks to a suggestion from Satyam Vaghani over twitter of course. He pointed me towards the QNIX QX2710 monitor and I was first surprised with the price. At less than $350 I had to give it a shot. I mean really, who wouldn’t want two 27 inch monitors on their desk? The Good The resolution was something I was really looking at. I selected the 2560 X 1440 resolution so that I didn’t feel like I needed to buy a new monitor in a year or two because something cooler came out. I’d say at this point in time, a 1920 X 1080 resolution is fairly standard. Also, with it being a much larger monitor than I’ve been accustomed to, the resolution needs to increase as well to provide a clear picture. ...
It may seem like a trivial thing, but setting up some customizations for your vCAC (now renamed vRealize Automation) deployment can really make your IaaS solution stand out, and a good looking portal might help with buy-in from your users. Branding Setting up your portal with a logo and a color scheme that mimic’s your organization is a typical thing to do after getting a portal up and running. Login to your vCAC instance with a Tenant Administrator login, go to the Administration Tab –> Branding. Here, you can upload your logo, add a product name (or department name), background colors, text colors and whatever you’d like. ...
Your powerful new cloud automation software is up and running, but we need to have some sort of check and balance to be sure that people aren’t creating VMs on a whim because it’s so easy to do. For this, we can use an approval process. Maybe a supervisor, or even the CIO can approval the additional resources. Approval Policies To setup an approval policy, login as a Tenant Administrator and go to the Administration Tab –> Approval Policies. Click the familiar green “+” icon to add a new policy. ...
In the last post, we showed how to use vCAC to surface a vCO workflow. The problem presents itself when the vCO workflow is looking for something other than a string for a variable. What if you are looking for an object? For example there may be a user named “Clarice Starling” and that name could be a string. But the Active Directory object for user Clarice Starling has many attributes such as account, description, permissions etc and that is not a string. So if you want to perform an action on an object from vCAC, what do you do? ...
We’ve got the main section of vCAC (now renamed vRealize Automation) setup and running and have created some blueprints to create some servers, but that’s really just the tip of the iceberg. We can utilize vCAC to perform tasks as well and in my opinion this is where vCAC really makes a big difference. Service Blueprints Instead of creating server blueprints, now we create service blueprints. They’ll be a similar setup to what you’ve seen in previous posts. Go to the Advanced Services Tab –> Service Blueprints and click the green “+” sign to add a new blueprint. ...
vCAC 6 (now renamed vRealize Automation) allows us to provision more than just virtual machines. We can also publish vCenter Orchestrator packages. To do so, we need to configure the Service Designer. Go to the Administration Tab –> Groups and create a group that will have access to the service designer. I just used the Domain Admins group, mainly because it’s my lab. Click the dropdown to edit the group properties. ...
We’re finally ready to start building some blueprints. Resources are available, reservations have been set, groups have been created and now we can build some blueprints. Blueprints Go to the Infrastructure Tab –> Blueprints –> Blueprints and then click “New Blueprint” –> Virtual –> vSphere (vCenter). Give the blueprint a name and a description. In my case, I’m creating a server 2008 R2 blueprint. Select a Reservation Policy and a machine prefix. Then enter a number of days for Archives. This is the number of days the virtual machines will be available after they expire. Think recycling bin in Windows. Also, if you’re so inclined, you can enter a dollar amount to assign to this template per day, so that later on each department can see how much money these VMs cost the company. ...