Sam has been working in the IT industry for nearly 20 years now, and is currently working for VMware as a Senior Technical Marketing Manger in the Cloud Management Business Unit (CMBU) focussed on Automation. Previously, he has worked as consultant for VMware PSO, specializing in cloud automation and network virtualization. His technical experience includes design, development and implementation of cloud solutions, network function virtualisation and the software defined datacentre. Sam specialises in automation of network virtualisation for cloud infrastructure, enabling public cloud solutions for service providers and private or hybrid cloud solutions for the enterprise.
Sam holds multiple high level industry certifications, including the VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) for Cloud Management and Automation. He is also a proud member of the vExpert community, holding the vExpert accolade from 2013-present, as well as being selected for the vExpert NSX, vExpert VSAN and vExpert Cloud sub-programs.
A requirement that often arises in large, complex orchestration projects is the need to encrypt and decrypt information. One such requirement recently specified triple DES password based encryption as the standard, which led me through a lot of Google searches to CryptoJS.
CryptoJS is a growing collection of standard and secure cryptographic algorithms implemented in JavaScript using best practices and patterns. They are fast, and they have a consistent and simple interface.
It’s a fairly common requirement when creating a new user to assign a randomly generated password, so during a recent engagement I wrote a little password generator to do that. I wanted to be able to chose whether special characters were used, and the length of the password - typically if the password doesn’t used special characters I would increase the length significantly!
Characters should be randomly picked from:
a-z A-Z 0-9 (optional) ASCII special characters Inputs passwordLength - the length of the password to be generated (number) excludePunctuation - exclude the use of special characters if TRUE (boolean) Outputs generatedPassword - the generated password (SecureString) The SecureString type prevents the string from being displayed in the workflow attributes - it can be used as a normal string, but will be asterisk’d when displayed.
One of the use cases I’ve been working on with a customer is based on the vRO/vCO multi-node plug-in and involves the master vRO/vCO node calling proxy workflows based on a parameter - in this case the target site. As you can see from this very simple diagram, a Cloud Management System (CMS) calls a workflow on the Master node, which then executes a proxy workflow on the correct site. The trick is getting the Master Orchestrator node to pick the right proxy workflow.
To quote the release notes for the latest version of vCO/vRO Multi-node Plugin:
The VMware vCenter Orchestrator Multi-Node Plug-In allows organizations to manage environments with multiple vCenter Orchestrator server instances.
As organizations increase their level of automation, they often find the need to deploy multiple Orchestrator instances. With the VMware vCenter Orchestrator Multi-Node Plug-In, administrators have a more efficient way to manage multiple Orchestrator instances from a central point. The plug-in allows administrators to log in to a master Orchestrator server to view the inventories and workflows of remote Orchestrator servers, and to trigger workflows remotely.
To add a Windows Server 2012 R2 PowerShell host using Basic Authentication only, follow these steps.
Ensure that the Windows Firewall service is running (it doesn’t matter if the firewall is enabled or disabled, it should always be running! That’s a general rule, not just for this).
On the PowerShell host open a command prompt (*NOT* PowerShell console) as administrator and run the quickconfig command - you can re-run it if it’s already been run - but make sure it has.
Yesterday (in case you missed it) was the fourth annual UK national VMUG at the National Motorcycle Museum in Birmingham. It was my second year attending and I continue to be blown away with the quality and value available at this event.
There’s a huge amount of content packed into this one-day event, so I’ll try and summarise my day…
vCurry and vQuiz The vCurry event was hosted on Monday night and is a great way to chill out after a long drive up to the midlands.
Having finally got some SSDs to be able to use my PernixPro/PernixPrime NFR license, I thought it was about time to get PernixData’s FVP 2.0 running in my lab again. I haven’t used FVP in my lab since it was running in beta, so I was keen to see the awesome new features in action. It really is an easy install process and took me less than an hour to get my cluster up and running with VMs I/O being accelerated.
I am aware that that’s not a catchy blog post title. In fact, it doesn’t even really describe the problem or solution very well - for that I need to go into a little bit more depth!
Suppose I have configured a Reservation with two Networks ticked (“192.168.1.0-VLAN1” and “192.168.10.0-VLAN10”). As you can see in the screenshot below, each of the networks has a Network Profile created and assigned with a network pool to provide IP addressing for the VMs.
*This post was meant to be published on Friday, VMworld Sleep Deprivation meant I didn’t click the button!*
This is the last post and a bit of a wrap up on my VMworld 2014 series!
There isn’t a keynote on day three, and there’s definitely a “winding down” feel as people tend to arrive later (if at all) and many are…feeling the effects of the previous night shall we say!
Day two of VMworld kicked off with a keynote session which traditionally includes demos of all that’s new. It was a well presented session with a glimpse into the sysadmin’s future with a demo of vCOps alerts popping up on Google glass. Since the sessions are available online I won’t go into detail, but it was worth a watch (if you didn’t watch the US one).
My morning consisted of preparations for the VCP NV (NSX) exam, which I detailed in a previous post.
A requirement that often arises in large, complex orchestration projects is the need to encrypt and decrypt information. One such requirement recently specified triple DES password based encryption as the standard, which led me through a lot of Google searches to CryptoJS.
CryptoJS is a growing collection of standard and secure cryptographic algorithms implemented in JavaScript using best practices and patterns. They are fast, and they have a consistent and simple interface.