An IT Professional with over 20 years’ experience with broad consultative, technical and managerial experience. Currently a solution architect working with customers and partners to architect and deliver hybrid cloud solutions using the VMware and other leading IT technologies. Leading and supporting business transformation programs, digital enterprise enablement programmes covering organisations in both private and public sectors.
A former leader of the Bristol and South West VMUG (VMware User Group)
Simon holds multiple high level industry certifications for IT Architecture, Cloud Management and Automation. He is also a proud member of the vExpert community, holding the vExpert accolade from 2014-present, as well as being selected for the vExpert Cloud Management sub-programs.
Simon is currently working for Xtravirt as a Solution Architect and can usually be found on twitter @simoneady
Integrating vROps with vRA 8 using Workspace One Auth Source Product Version - vRealize Automation 8.x Why integrate vROps with vRA 8? vRealize Automation can work with vRealize Operations Manager to perform advanced workload placement, provide deployment health and virtual machine metrics, and display pricing.
So what is the problem? When configuring the integration, you will input the vROps URL and it will also ask you to input a username and password of the service account you wish to use.
Why use Content Libraries with vRA 8 Product Version - vRealize Automation 8.x What are vSphere Content Libraries? A content library stores and manages content in the form of library items. A single library item can consist of one file or multiple files. For example, the OVF template is a set of files (.ovf, .vmdk, and .mf). When you upload an OVF template to the library, you upload the entire set of files, but the result is a single library item of the OVF Template type.
Using vRealize Orchestreator MP in vROps Product Version - vRealize Operations 7.x and 8.x A few years ago VMware released the Orchestrator MP which is a superb way to directly call vRO workflows from vROps by way of alerts and actions. This opens the door to all manner of ideas for conditional automation using vROps.
The limitation Recently for a customer we planned to use the vRO MP to assist a customer with a very unique/niche challenge.
vROps Remote Collectors - Design Considerations Product Version - vRealize Operations 7.x and 8.x As part of VMware Validated Designs tyically you would use Remote Collectors not just in different DCs but also local to the analytics cluster. However there are a circumstances where the rules “change”.
When using RecoverPoint or Site Recovery Manager Design Assumption - you have Remote Collectors on your Primary Site and on your Failover Site.
vROps Cluster without a Load Balancer (gotchas) Product Version - vRealize Operations 7.5 While it is far from recomended to deploy a vROps Cluster without a loadbalancer there are circumstances where this is done.
Recently helping a customer deploy a couple of simple issues cropped up that were not immediately obvious as to why they were issues.
Unable to connect to Master Node when expanding the cluster We hit this issue and initialy it was a question mark moment there were no firewalls in the way and network connectivity was good end to end.
VMware have been very busy in the last few months across many of their products and Operations Management has not gone untouched. We saw glimpses of things to come late last year and now we see the Cloud Management Team in VMware really ramping things up with vRealize Operation 8.1
vRealize Operations Cloud One of the bigger items to arrive very shortly is vRealize Operations Cloud (SaaS), this means you do not need to worry about standing vROps up in your environment to see what value it can bring to your infrastructure monitoring.
So it being 2020 now I thought it would be a pleasant exercise to quickly glance over the previous ten years and reflect a little. Before I even begin I will say I have never been happier in my career and work/life balance (which is always an on going effort to keep appropriate)
I am going to break it down in a yearly format and then summarize at the end.
I have been working with VMware Cloud Foundation recently and while for the most part things went well there were occasions where challenges were encountered which made the delivery to the customer all the more trickier than expected.
This article is a list of observations and things to most definitely check or watch out for when delivering a VCF project.
We were working with VCF version 3.7.2 (yes I am aware 3.
I recently upgraded an instance of vRA from 7.2 to 7.5 and rather than do it the manual way I used VMware’s vRealize LifeCycle Manager (version 2.0 update 3).
Everything was going great and according to plan, the vRLCM pre-requisites checker made short work of all of the checks you need to do before you start an upgrade of vRA. You can see below vRLCM does a great job of keeping you informed of the current progress and in a really elegant way.
It has been a few years since I read (and lost) a great article on career progression and personal insight. That article helped me relax into who I am from a professional point of view, but it also challenged me.
I have been in IT for over 20 years now and in truth the first 10 years were not so great (perhaps a story for another time) but it was when I stumbled upon the vCommunity by way of Twitter and then subsequently I attended my first VMUG (in London) which completely challenged and changed my way of thinking and approach to my career.