VCDX-NV – #289

September 24, 2020 Chris Noon 0

On Monday 14th of September 2020, I remotely sat the VCDX defence and the following Tuesday, I received the fantastic news that I passed. I am officially VCDX number 289! For those of you that are new to vMusketeers and my VCDX blogs, here are a link to the previous 3 blogs and a vBrownBag video: The design document. The design defence. The scenario defence. VCDX motivation (vBrownBag). The experience. I spent a lot of time talking to and working with existing VCDX’s and VCDX applicants. Because of this, the defence day was more or less as expected. It followed the format I’ve discussed previously: design defence and then design scenario. The only difference to my defence and other first […]

What is new in vSphere 7 U1, vSAN 7U1 and VCF 4.1

September 15, 2020 Kim Bottu 0

Introduction September 2020 brings a lot of new features and updates to some of the VMware product range such as vSphere 7 U1, vSAN 7U1 and VCF 4.1. I have to say, it was pretty hard not to spill any secrets this time! vSphere 7 U1 vSphere 7 U1 supports Tanzu! The prerequisite to deploy VCF, should you want to deploy Tanzu, has been dropped. Yes, you have read that right! As of vSphere 7 U1 we will be able to deploy enterprise-grade Kubernetes into an existing infrastructure. Want more good news? Deploying Tanzu on vSphere can be accomplished in less than 1 hour! Deploying a Tanzu POC or running Tanzu in your homelab has never been that easy! NSX-T […]

Integrating CloudHealth and vROps

September 13, 2020 Kim Bottu 0

Introduction CloudHealth is the best product available to manage and optimize your cloud spend and vROps is the best tool to monitor and optimize the Cloud. This article will go into the technical details of how to integrate CloudHealth into vROps. Later Anthony Poh (CloudHealth Senior TAM) will write a second post which will show you what the things in this post look like in the CloudHealth UI itself. CloudHealth If you are running workloads and services in the cloud and you want to optimize your cloud spend, CloudHealth is the way to go! A couple of CloudHealth features you definitely have to look into are: Perspectives, Reporting & Dashboards, Integrations, Governance and Security. Integration with vROps Before you can […]

An IT story of getting out of burn-out and depression

August 10, 2020 Kim Bottu 1

I have never been good at talking about my own feelings. To expose myself in such a way always makes me feel vulnerable and I don’t like feeling vulnerable. However, after reading some very humble stories from people in IT having to deal with burnout and suffering from depression, I have decided to share my experiences as well, and more importantly, how I got out of it all. The beginning I used to work as a systems engineer for a bigger global enterprise. For the first time in my life, I would work with VMware technology such as vCenter server and VMware View. Not only would I have to keep all systems healthy in the office I was working, but […]

NSX-T Automation using Terraform: The how (VMC)!

August 10, 2020 Chris Noon 3

I started the series with a post about why I wanted to use Terraform. Now we have the why out of the way, let’s get to the fun stuff… the how! I use Terraform for 2 things. The first is to spin up SDDC’s on VMC and configure the VMC NSX-T piece. The second is spinning up NSX-T environments in the lab, which will hopefully make it into production one day. In this post, I’ll focus on the VMC element. The VMC Environment. I’ll start by assuming you know what VMC on AWS is and have a high-level understanding of its concepts and what it delivers. I’ll skip the step for deploying a VMC SDDC using Terraform, but if you […]

NSX-T Automation using Terraform: The why!

August 3, 2020 Chris Noon 1

Hi all, I hope you are all doing well during these trying times. For months, possibly even years, I’ve been convincing myself I’d dive into automation.  What better time than one where I am forced into isolation with my laptop.  In truth, I was jolted into action by a business requirement for automating the build of a number of environments.  These environments had to be standardised and utilise many of the same configuration elements. I’ve spent the better part of a month learning about Cloud (AWS and VMC on AWS) along with Network Automation, which brings us onto our first section… Why Terraform? I first began by googling ‘Network Automation Tools’ and reading a ton of articles.  Whittling down my […]

Avi Network: Base Configuration via API

June 19, 2020 Chris Noon 3

API Reference. I wrote a post a few weeks back on how to get an Avi proof of concept up and running. Hopefully, it helped and continues to help others wanting to start playing with Avi. I like to spin my lab up and down, pushing config when needed. This post will be focused around the Avi APIs and how to stand up the basic configuration previously discussed. I used the Avi API guide for reference:https://avinetworks.com/docs/latest/ Alternatively, you can navigate to:https://[Avi Controller IP]/api At this stage, I will assume at least 1 or 3 Controller(s) has been deployed, a logical cloud has been created along with the relevant networks for Avi consumption. Disclaimer. I will be providing the bare minimum […]

Using the VMware Lifecycle Manager 8.1 API to deploy vROps, vRLI, vRA and vRNI

June 10, 2020 Kim Bottu 0

Introduction Creating the API calls I needed in my lab took me quite some time. I probably could have saved a lot of time by first looking at the JSON files VRSLCM can export out of the box. But of course, I didn’t. vRSLCM is able to export a JSON file for any environment you have setup using vRSLCM. In this blog post I want to show you how I did what I did and where you can find the bits and pieces I needed to create my API calls. The easy way If you want to see a JSON file of a real world deployed environment in vRSLCM, why not export it from the UI? That is right, the […]