Sam McGeown
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.
All posts by Sam McGeown
Autumn seems to be a time for the winds of change to blow through our industry, and this year that’s true for me.
TL;DR - I’m leaving VMware PSO to join the Cloud Management Business Unit as a Technical Marketing Manager for Cloud Automation!
It’s been a little over two years since I joined VMware as a Senior Conusltant in the EMEA NSX Practice, and in that time I’ve enjoyed some great opportunities, worked with some great people and technologies.Written by Sam McGeown
on 2/8/2019
I run quite a few applications in Docker as part of my home network - there’s a small selection below, but at any one time there might be 10-15 more apps I’m playing around with:
plex - Streaming media server unifi - Ubiquiti Network Controller homebridge - Apple Homekit compatible smart home integration influxdb - Open source time series database grafana - Data visualization & Monitoring pihole - internet tracking and ad blocker vault - Hashicorp secret management Until recently a single PhotonOS VM with Docker was all I needed to run - everything shared the same host IP, stored it’s configuration locally or on an NFS mount and generally ran fine.Written by Sam McGeown
on 19/6/2019
Following on from me recent post deploying Kubernetes with the NSX-T CNP, I wanted to extend my environment to make use of the vSphere Cloud Provider to enable Persistent Volumes backed by vSphere storage. This allows me to use Storage Policy to create Persistent Volumes based on policy. For example, I’m going to create two classes of storage, Fast and Slow - Fast will be vSAN based and Slow will be NFS based.Written by Sam McGeown
on 12/6/2019Written by Sam McGeown
on 23/5/2019
I ran into this UI bug the other day when I was trying to enable route redistribution on an Edge in a Secondary site of a cross-vCenter NSX deployment.
The Edge itself was deployed correctly, and configured to peer with a physical northbound router, however when I attempted to configure the route redistribution I was unable to do so.
Fortunately, the solution was simple - use the API.
Perform a GET operation to retrieve the current BGP configuration 1 GET https://{{nsxmanager}}/api/4.
When I started my blog back in May 2007 (12 years ago!) I was running Wordpress, then switched to DotNetNuke, then BlogEngine, then finally back to Wordpress - which I’ve used since 2010. Today I’ve cut over to a new architecture based on Hugo and hosted on AWS using a combination of Route53, Cloudfront and S3.
Why the change? If it ain’t broke… You may well ask why I’ve made the move, or you may not…I’m going to tell you anyway…
Most vSphere admins are more than comfortable with using Update Manager to download patches and update their environment, but few that I talk to actually know a huge amount about the Update Mangaer Download Service (UMDS). UMDS is tool you can install to download patches (and third party VIBs - I’ll get to that) for Update Manager and it’s useful for environments that don’t have access to the internet, or air-gapped, and also for environments with multiple vCenter Servers where you don’t necessarily want to download the same patch on every server.Written by Sam McGeown
on 8/2/2019
Just a quick post today to cover a new vRO action and workflow I’ve uploaded to GitHub that configures vCenter High Availability in the basic mode. This is based on William Lam’s excellent PowerShell module that does the same, but using vRO. I also hope to release a version for the advanced mode based on my PowerShell script in the near future.
TL;DR - package is availabile on GitHub
The workflow itself is pretty self explanatory, with my deployment action, which returns a VC:Task, and the standard “wait for a task to end” action.
I recently started looking into ways of monitoring the temperature and humidity in my garage - for two reasons. Firstly, I have my lab workload cluster out there in the form of a Dell C6100, and I’ve noticed with the recent weather that the temperature in there gets…a bit warm. Secondly, I like to brew beer at home, and one of the keys to a good brew is consistent temperature!