Articles by Bilal Ahmed

Unlock Your FinOps Certification: How to Pass the Practitioner Exam with Ease #FinOps #CloudCostManagement #ExamTips #FinOpsPractitioner #CloudOptimization #FinOpsPro

September 25, 2024 Bilal Ahmed 0

So, you are here because you are considering taking the FinOps Certified Practitioner exam. I am quite new to the FinOps thing, but the more I read into it the more I find it interesting. The key concepts I like to keep in mind: There are currently six components of the FinOps Framework: • Principles – drive our FinOps practices• Personas – stakeholders that FinOps supports• Domains – fundamental business outcomes• Capabilities – activities performed to achieve desired outcomes (Domains) of FinOps• Phases – iterative process model for exercising FinOps Capabilities• Maturity Model – incremental assessment criteria for understanding the state of any FinOps activity or overall practice Now let’s break each of them down into a bit more detail: […]

The Basics of #AI #Prompt Engineering #vExpert #LLM

September 2, 2024 Bilal Ahmed 0

Let us recap quickly: When interacting with Large Language Models and using them to assist you, you follow this methodology: So now we have got that out of the way, we can now look some prompt engineering. This is all about the need to adjust your prompt to help guide the LLM  and make it output the info you need. To add to that we have the topic of Inference:  Inference is the process of running live data through a trained AI model to make a prediction or solve a task. Another way to look at it is that it is the process of applying learned knowledge to new and unseen data to make decisions or predictions. This topic becomes […]

So Let’s Chat about #AI and #LLMs

August 27, 2024 Bilal Ahmed 0

First off, is it just me that when someone mentions AI, that I think of Ali G? I’ve been wanting to say that for ages, now that I have got that off my chest, let’s continue! I have started digging into the topic recently and this and any following blog posts are just going to be my ramblings on the matter and could indeed be incorrect (as I am still learning). I’ve done a couple NVIDIA training courses on the topic so far and they are free, so please go check them out if you just want to get a high-level feel and overview of the topic! I mean let’s be honest the topic is a deep deep topic that […]

HCX 4.8 What’s New?! Selectable Mesh! #HCX #VMware #Migrations

November 22, 2023 Bilal Ahmed 0

So, it has been a while since I have blogged anything. Life is busy and HCX has been slowly improving with every release of the product. Now with 4.8, there is a big change which has been asked for by many customers and by us internally for a while. The chance to use multiple service meshes within the same cluster! Now let’s rewind slightly If you had a service mesh going from one source cluster to another, that has always been supported. If you had one source cluster that wanted to go to 2 or more destination clusters, that was fully supported with multiple HCX Service meshes. It was called the One to Many approach: In the diagram below, this […]

Creating #VMConAWS #NSX-T Firewall Rules and Segments with #PowerCLI

June 6, 2022 Bilal Ahmed 0

Well hello there. I had a customer that was wanting to do some work using scripting to create NSX-T segments and DFW rules in VMConAWS, for their PROD SDDC and for their new VCDR SDDC. Over the years I have seen a lot of people think that copying the VM data and being able to recover is the hard part when that can be the easiest part. Things like VCDR are designed to get your copies of the VMs up and running, but what about the networking and firewall rules you need to ensure communication works and is still secure? So, this ended up being a discussion on the various ways to create rules on both SDDCS and this led […]

Migrate VMs using #HCX #OSAM and #PowerCLI

April 4, 2022 Bilal Ahmed 0

Let’s talk about OSAM So “Operating System Assisted Migration”, can be used when you have Enterprise level HCX licensing. In the HCX Connector you have to download the OS agent which then you install onto the guest operating system: Once you have downloaded it locally, you can then copy it into the guest OS and install it, it then communicates back to the Sentinel Gateway Appliance and is picked up by the HCX Manager as you can see in the above screenshot. Now this is a good time to plug my co-workers’ blog https://www.chrisdooks.com/2022/02/24/automating-the-hcx-osam-sentinel-agent-install-via-sccm/ He discusses how to push the sentinel agent out via SCCM for Windows machines, which is much better than manually copying it across to various Windows […]

Lets Talk About Protecting and Recovering VMs with #VCDR #vExpert

December 6, 2021 Bilal Ahmed 0

So now we have deployed and configured VCDR, now we can go into all the bits that allow you to protect your VMs and failover! Protection Groups So now we can get into the nitty-gritty of starting to create Protection Groups and Recovery Plans. This is the meat of it all, where you define what is going to be protected and how it should be recovered. As you can see you can define how VMs are added to the protection group by using Naming Patterns, Tags or VM Folders. In this example I have used vSphere Tags: In my vCenter you can see I have created a tag specifically for VCDR to use: Then we can look at the various […]