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.
This is the second part of the 3rd article in a series about how to build-out a simple vCAC 6 installation to a distributed model.
By the end of this part, we will not have modified the vCAC deployment in any way, we’ll just have 3 configured load balanced URLs
vCAC Simple Install with vPostgres deployed and load balancers prepared An overview of the steps required are below:
Issue and install certificates Deploy an external vPostgres appliance and migrate the vCAC database Configure load balancing Deploy a second vCAC appliance and configure clustering Install and configure additional IaaS server Deploy vCenter Orchestrator Appliance cluster I’ve previously configured 3 DNS records for the load balanced services (see part 3.
This is the first part of the 3rd article in a series about how to build-out a simple vCAC 6 installation to a distributed model.
By the end of this part, we will not have modified the vCAC deployment in any way, we’ll just have 3 configured load balanced URLs
vCAC simple configuration with vPostgres and Load Balancers prepared An overview of the steps required are below:
Issue and install certificates Deploy an external vPostgres appliance and migrate the vCAC database Configure load balancing Deploy a second vCAC appliance and configure clustering Install and configure additional IaaS server Deploy vCenter Orchestrator Appliance cluster Deploy a vShield Edge appliance Log in to your vShield Manager and select your Datacenter, then the Network Virtualisation tab
This is the second article in a series about how to build-out a simple vCAC 6 installation to a distributed model.
The diagram below shows the deployment at the end of this part, with vPostgres deployed and the vCAC Appliance running from the remote database.
vCAC deploymnent with vPostgres deployed An overview of the steps required are below:
Issue and install certificates Deploy an external vPostgres appliance and migrate the vCAC database Configure load balancing Deploy a second vCAC appliance and configure clustering Install and configure additional IaaS server Deploy vCenter Orchestrator Appliance cluster Create the required DNS records First of all, create DNS records for your vPostgres database server – you need both an A and PTR record.
This is the first article in a series about how to build-out a simple vCAC 6 installation to a distributed model.
Simple vCAC deployment In a simple installation you have the Identity Appliance, the vCAC appliance (which includes a vPostgres DB and vCenter Orchestrator instance) and an IaaS server. The distributed model still has a single Identity Appliance but clusters 2 or more vCAC appliances behind a load balancer, backed by a separate vPostgres database appliance.
Derek Seaman’s excellent SSL toolkit. I know that there are hours and hours of work put into this script by Derek and I want to thank him for that – it’s a massive time saver. This modification is to fit a different set of circumstances – “standing on the shoulders of giants” – and should in no way be seen as me criticising or stealing Derek’s work.
This week, while using the SSL Certificate Automation Tool and Derek’s script, I encountered a couple of things I felt could be improved for a more complex environment.
I was recently sent a copy of Christian Mohn’s new book “Learning Veeam Backup and Replication for VMware vSphere” to review, and as ever this is my honest opinion of this book. I am not receiving anything other than the copy of the book for this review. I don’t work for a vendor, so I have no axe to grind!
Content The book starts of with explanations of basic backup strategies and explains principals like Grandfather-Father-Son media rotation and RPO/RTOs.
Yesterday saw another fantastic London VMUG with lots of quality sessions and opportunities to network with peers and friends. The committee seem to do a fantastic job every time and this one was no exception, so thanks to Alaric Davies, Jane Rimmer, Stuart Thompson and Simon Gallagher!
One of the best things for me about the VMUG is the chance to chat with some of the smartest and most influential people in the VMware world – a trip to the coffee table provided a great opportunity to “chew the vfat” with two of the VMUG’s biggest characters, Mike Laverick and Ricky El-Qasem – all before any sessions had started.
I recently got my hands on a copy* of Chris Wahl and Steve Pantol’s Networking for VMware Administrators and was very keen to read it – especially given the reputation of the authors. I came to the book as someone who is at CCNA level (although now expired) and someone who regularly designs complex VMware networks using standard and distributed switches. I would class myself as having a fairly decent understanding of networking, though not a networking specialist.
In my previous post Backing up ESXi 5.5 host configurations with vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) – Workflow design walkthrough I showed how to create a workflow to back up host configurations, but it was limited to one host at a time. For this post I’m going to show how to create a new workflow that calls the previous one on multiple hosts using a ForEach loop to run it against each one.
As a little learning project, I thought I’d take on Simon’s previous post about backing up ESXi configurations and extend it to vCenter Orchestrator (vCO), and document how I go about building up a workflow. I’m learning more and more about vCO all the time, but I found it has a really steep entry point, and finding use cases is hard if you haven’t explored capabilities.
The steps I want to create in this post are:
