ITQ

Merging RVTools reports using Power BI

May 12, 2021 Kim Bottu 2

RVTools reports are very useful to quickly glance over the state of your virtual environment. However, when you deal with multiple vCenters servers, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to consolidate RVTools reports into a single interface? Enter Power BI. Power BI goes beyond that what you can achieve by using Pivot Tables in Excel. Requirements: Install Power BI Install RVTools What now? Export RVTools reports as Excel files Save the excel files to a dedicated folder Now you have to point Power BI to import sources from a folder. If you want an active representation on how you do this, you can follow this video. Once done, select “combine and transform data” Now, to combine (reads: merge) xlsx […]

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 […]

How to export and import vRLI alerts which make use of vROps fallback objects, into another datacentre, by using Postman

February 25, 2020 Kim Bottu 0

In case you are managing a multitude of datacentres and are relying on vROps and vRLI to monitor your environments, by now you have found out that some alerts are present in vROps and other alerts are present in vRLI. You can configure alerts in both products, but while you can export and import vROps alert definitions and symptom definitions created in environment A into environment B, this does not go as easily for vRLI when you are using vROps fallback objects . If you are not using fallback objects, you can disregard this post. Requirements vRLI vROps Postman or any other REST API client. I use Postman myself. Notepad ++ Create some alerts in vRLI Create some alerts in […]

CAL! Center for Advanced Learning Advanced Architecture Course – Day 1

June 11, 2019 Kim Bottu 0

Introduction Changing employer to one of the major players in the Benelux, has nice perks. One of these is being able to attend a course where there a specific prerequisites prior to be able to attend to it. The Advanced Architecture Course by the VMware Center for Advanced Learning is such a course. I had been hoping to be able to participate in it ever since I attended a presentation about it at VMware Empower last year and I am very happy that I have been giving the opportunity! Day 1 Day one started very early. We had to be at the campus at seven AM for all the formalities and administration. A pity no one thought about giving us […]

Create an alert for a failed vRO workflow in vRealize Operations Manager

January 3, 2019 Kim Bottu 0

How do you create an alert for a failed vRO workflow in vRealize Operations Manager? You might have noticed when you want to create an alert in vROps for a vRealize Orchestrator workflow,  thatout of the box alerts for vRO workflows simply do not exist in vROps. However, should you have installed the content pack for vRealize Orchestrator, you might have seen that workflow executions and failures are displayed in Log Insight. Aha moment! Let’s integrate vRLI with vROps! Requirements: vROps vRLI Content Pack for vROps in vRLI vRealize Orchestrator First steps Make sure your appliances have been properly configured. So this means that you have to integrate vCenter, vRLI and vROps with eachother. Plenty of guides around to do just […]

VSAN 6.7 U1 – What’s new?

August 27, 2018 Kim Bottu 1

Like most of us, I too have been counting down to VMworld and the big announcements it brings each year and because I have taken a keen interest into vSAN, I have been mostly wondering which announcements would be made about vSAN.  So let’s skip to what is most important to me: What is new with vSAN? By now you might have heard rumors about a new version of vSAN, and it is true ladies and gentlemen,  vSAN 6.7 Update 1 is almost upon us. A little voice told me it should be released in the 3th quarter of the year. Hybrid cloud integration. VMware realizes the importance for companies to be able to go to the cloud, to be […]

How attending VMworld changed my professional life and can change yours too!

June 3, 2018 Kim Bottu 2

It’s been six years since I attended VMworld for the very first time. Up until my very first VMworld I never had attended any vendor conference and here I was on the plane on route to Barcelona. As soon as I got off the plane and out of the airport, I immediately got smacked in the face with a heatwave. My first planning mistake became very clear as soon as I entered my hotel room: crappy air conditioning. Not really what you desire for when it is blistering hot outside. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be my only planning mistake. Ahead of the conference I had made a list of all the sessions I wanted to attend to and all the guided labs […]