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.
Recently I’ve been working on some ideas in my lab to leverage the AWS endpoint on vRealize Automation. One of the things I needed to get working was getting Software Components working on my AWS deployed instances.
The diagram to the right shows my end-stage network - the instance deployed by vRA into AWS should be in a private subnet in my VPC, and should use my local lab DNS server and be able to access my vRA instance.
When you’re working with Amazon and vRealize Automation Software Components, one of the requirements is for the Guest Agent (gugent) to talk back to the vRealize Automation APIs - the gugent polls the API for tasks it should perform, downloads them from the API and executes them, then updates the tasks with a status.
This means that Virtual Machines deployed as EC2 instances in an AWS VPC require the ability to talk back to internal corporate networks - not something you’d want to publish on the internet!
So, this is something I’ve been waiting to write up for a while! PowerShell for macOS has been available for a while now, but what a lot of PowerCLI fans have been waiting for is to be able to use PowerCLI direct from their Mac.
Today, amidst all of the noise from VMWorld, PowerCLI Core dropped as a Fling! That means that although it’s not ready for production use yet, it is ready to start testing - and I’m way more excited than I should be!
I ran into a strange one with my lab today where the previously working VSAN cluster couldn’t be enabled. Symptoms included:
The button to enable VSAN was missing from vSphere Web Client vsphere_client_virgo.log had the following error: [2016-09-16T14:49:03.473Z] [ERROR] http-bio-9090-exec-18 70001918 100023 200008 com.vmware.vise.data.query.impl.DataServiceImpl Error occurred while executing query:
QuerySpec
QueryName: dam-auto-generated: ConfigureVsanActionResolver:dr-57
ResourceSpec
Constraint: ObjectIdentityConstraint
TargetType: ClusterComputeResource
Target: ManagedObjectReference: type = ClusterComputeResource, value = domain-c481, serverGuid = a44e7d15-e63f-46c2-a1aa-b9b1cbf972be
I was able to enable VSAN on the cluster using rvc commands
vRealize Automation vExperts Workshop I attended a workshop with Jad El Zein in Barcelona last year and it was one of the best sessions I attended, especially as it was just on the news of vRA7’s release. This workshop was this year’s equivelant, but because the session included a lot of people just getting started with vRA a lot of the time was taken to explain what vRA does, so there was no real time for the more in depth details on the new features that are coming (some already announced and in Tech Preview).
Day 1 keynote I’m not going to lie, the start to the keynote was weird. There was drums and poetry. I will say no more. Another thing I’m not going to do (because many people do it far better than me - I’m looking at you Julian) is do a blow-by-blow account of the keynotes, for me the headlines are that VMware announced VMware Cloud Foundation and Cross Cloud Services.
Greetings from Day 1 of VMworld US 2016!
Every year I try and make use of the VMworld discount at the exam centre, and this year was no exception I sat the VCAP6-DCV Deploy exam, and results are still pending! Overall it’s a good exam, there was very little of the spelling and grammatical errors I’ve complained about in the past, performance was OK and the level of difficulty was good.
I landed in Las Vegas about 9:30PM local time on Saturday evening, having not executed my plan to sleep on the flight! I had planned to sleep on the Toronto to Vegas leg, which would have meant I could head over to the Sips and Stogies pre-event, however a very rowdy hen do a couple of rows away meant that I didn’t sleep at all, so I grabbed a taxi down to my hotel, the Excalibur, and got myself checked in.
Although it’s fairly limited, you can add AWS as an endpoint for vRealize Automation 7 and consume EC2 AMIs as part of a blueprint. You can even add the deployed instances to an existing Elastic Load Balancer at deploy time. In this post I’ll run through the basics to get up and running and deploy your first highly available (multiple Availability Zone, load balanced) blueprint.
Preparing AWS for use as a vRA endpoint There are some obvious pre-requisites for attaching an AWS endpoint - for example, you need to have a VPC configured.
In my post yesterday I promised to post my VMworld session picks, so here it is! I have filled my schedule, and even added some alternate picks when there were too many good sessions to go for. My session picks are focussing around:
vRealize Automation NSX VSAN PowerCLI, APIs and automation Now, before anyone tells me I’ve picked too many and I won’t make it to all of them - I know!
When you’re working with Amazon and vRealize Automation Software Components, one of the requirements is for the Guest Agent (gugent) to talk back to the vRealize Automation APIs - the gugent polls the API for tasks it should perform, downloads them from the API and executes them, then updates the tasks with a status.
This means that Virtual Machines deployed as EC2 instances in an AWS VPC require the ability to talk back to internal corporate networks - not something you’d want to publish on the internet!
So, this is something I’ve been waiting to write up for a while! PowerShell for macOS has been available for a while now, but what a lot of PowerCLI fans have been waiting for is to be able to use PowerCLI direct from their Mac.
Today, amidst all of the noise from VMWorld, PowerCLI Core dropped as a Fling! That means that although it’s not ready for production use yet, it is ready to start testing - and I’m way more excited than I should be!