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.
I’ve been very fortunate to be able to go to VMworld Europe for the past 3 years, mainly thanks to the vExpert program and the availability of the blogger pass. This year I knew that I wouldn’t be able to get to Barcelona because of work, so I thought I’d apply for a VMworld US blogger pass - I’m very excited to have been given one! As with previous years, I'll be blogging at least once a day with my thoughts and any useful info I've gleaned - I definitely don't want to take the pass for granted!
I ran into this problem at a customer site where all the Log Insight nodes were changed due to some IP address conflicts. I think the problem occurred because the IP addresses were all changed and the VMs shut down, without time for the application to update the node IPs.
The symptoms:
The web interface was down, a netstat -ano | grep -i “443” showed the service was listening _service loginsight status|restart|stop|start _hung and then timed out on the Master node The loginsight service was not running on the Worker nodes /var/log/loginsight/runtime.
Recently I was asked to develop some vRealize Orchestrator workflows against the F5 BIG-IP iControl REST API, but I was not able to test freely against a production appliance. After a lot of attempts to get in contact with F5 for a 90-day trial of the full version, or to purchase a lab license, I came up empty handed. The free version you can download from F5’s website is version 11.
Big thanks to Jose Luis Gomez for this solution, his response to my tweet was spot on and invaluable!
I’ve been trying to configure vCloud Air as a vCloud Director host in vRealize Orchestrator in order to create some custom resource actions for Day 2 operations in vRealize Automation. What I found was that there’s *very* little information out there on how to do this, and I ended up writing my own custom resource mapping for the virtual machines to VCAC:VirtualMachine objects - at least that way I could add my resource action.
<img class=“alignright size-thumbnail wp-image-6186” src="/images/2015/07/vRA-Product-Icon-Mac_0.png" alt=“vRA” width=“150” height=“150” - a properties object.
I wanted to create a workflow that I could enable to log all of the keys, values and types of the properties object for each stage of the vRA7 MachineProvisioning workflows, and create a reference for myself on the payload for each stage.
To do this I created a new workflow “debugProperties” and added an input variable called “payload”, type Properties.
VMware KB2140539 where requesting an XaaS (vRealize Orchestrator) blueprint fails with:
Failed to retrieve form from provider
The KB describes it occuring when “more than one VMware vRealize Orchestrator instance is configured for different tenants”. The issue I faced is not the same - in my case, I had the system default tenant configured to use the embedded vRO, and the customer tenant configured to use the system default (which would be the embedded vRO!
The new Event Broker service in vRA7 is one of the most exciting features of this latest release, the possibilities for extensibility are huge. At this point it time you can still use the old method of using workflow stubs to customise machine lifecycle events, but at some point in the future this will be deprecated and the Event Broker will be the only way to extend.
With this in mind, I wanted to use the Event Broker to do something that I am asked on almost every customer engagement - custom hostnames beyond what the Machine Prefixes mechanism can do.
Just a quick little post this morning! Anyone who works with the vRealize Automation APIs should definitely check out Grant Orchard and Roman Tarnavski’s awesome little side project, Platypus.
It only took me a couple of minutes to get it running on my MacBook - here’s how!
Download and install AppCatalyst
Open a new terminal window
cd /opt/vmware/appcatalyst/ Create a new VM called “photon"
appcatalyst vm create photon Power it on
If you use the in-built vRealize Orchestrator instance shipped with the vRealize Automation appliance then you might run into this issue when working with the REST client:
Connection pool shut down (Workflow:Get-IdentityToken / Scripting (item3)#14)
The vRA appliance version I have (6.2 - note to self, need to update lab!) includes the plugin version 1.0.4 for REST. According to the release notes, this was fixed in 1.0.5 - typical!
So the solution is to upgrade the REST API plugin 🙂
First of all, thank you to everyone who came along to my session at the UKVMUG yesterday, it was great to see so many people at a round table discussion, sorry for those that had to stand! I hope that it was helpful and maybe a few of you will be building some awesome labs in the cloud!
Ravello very kindly sponsored a free home lab, equivalent to the vExpert 1000 hours account as a prize for my session at the UKVMUG yesterday.
Recently I was asked to develop some vRealize Orchestrator workflows against the F5 BIG-IP iControl REST API, but I was not able to test freely against a production appliance. After a lot of attempts to get in contact with F5 for a 90-day trial of the full version, or to purchase a lab license, I came up empty handed. The free version you can download from F5’s website is version 11.