The Donkey has a well know reputation for stubbornness, a strong sense of self-preservation, means it’s difficult to force a donkey into doing something it perceives to be dangerous. Yet, Donkeys can be very dependable, although cautious they are also, intelligent, friendly, playful, and eager to learn. (Ref: wikipedia.org/wiki/Donkey) The Managed Service Model [...]
Cool stuff for the tech minded
Just in case you wondered how I ended up on an analysts’ couch in Silicon valley... TechConfessions the Show, S1 | E8 I wanted to highlight some of the VMware community programs I’ve been involved with over the last year, I've had a blast, and others might want to, and can share these experiences. VMware [...]
VMware Cloud on AWS – Network Overview
Network is the foundation on which all others services depend, and it is fundamental that from both the AWS and VMware perspective we get this right before doing anything else. In this blog which follows on from VMware Cloud on AWS Overview, VMware Cloud on AWS - Elastic Resource Management, and VMware Cloud on AWS - Storage overview we [...]
Use PowerCLI to mass assign tags and storage based policy management
Storage Based Policy Management (SBPM) has been around for a while, when working with storage tiers, metro clusters, or vSAN, it's either fundamental or best practice. But clicking on anything more than half a dozen vms and datastores is a bit too much hard work. Using a mix of PowerCLI and the web client I [...]
VMware Cloud on AWS – Storage Overview
This post follows on from the previous posts VMware on AWS – Overview and Setup and VMware on AWS – Elastic Resource Management I will focus firstly on VMC storage and then go to discuss Native AWS storage and how this could be used with VMC. VMC Storage ESXi will be installed directly on [...]
VMware Cloud on AWS – Elastic Resource Management
In my previous post, I talked about the setup of a SDDC on AWS. Now I want to focus on resource management and the scalability features Add/Remove Hosts One of the coolest features of VMC, is the ability to scale up or down (keep in mind 4 hosts is the minimum). The Add /Remove Host feature allows [...]
VMware Cloud on AWS – Overview and Setup
VMworld 2017 was a great opportunity to learn about VMware on AWS or VMC (VMware Cloud). What is being offered is a SDDC stack, ESXi, vSAN, and networks built on NSX. AWS will provide bare metal hosts with dual 18 core 2.3 Ghz CPUs, 512 GB of memory and 16 TB of SDD storage, VMware will [...]
VMworld 2017 – The Exploding Cloud
VMWorld General Session US In the General session for VMWorld US, Pat Gelsinger, (VMWare CEO) looked to me like a guy who knew the party was coming to a close and it was time to make a move for the girl on the other side of the room. Amazon Web Services might not think of [...]
Why don’t we do like AWS do? – Multisite Networking
When I started playing with virtual machines, I got a real buzz at how easy it was, spin up a vm, move it between servers or storage, right click and action. I get a similar buzz from working with AWS, they make technically complex but desirable solutions look easy. For example distributing an application across [...]
Why attend a vmug event
This is one of mankind's oldest riddles, it comes from ancient Mesopotamia probably around 3000 years ago. There is a house. One enters it blind and comes out seeing. What is it? The answer is at the bottom of the page While many companies are cutting back on training budgets, giving employees a few hours off [...]
VMware Services on AWS
VMware have just announced a partnership deal with AWS that will allow the running of dedicated vSphere based services directly on AWS clouds. Customers can either integrate on-premises vSphere services with AWS cloud services, or have a hybrid model of on-prem and cloud vCenters. For example this would allow an vm running in a local datacenter to leverage [...]
VMware NSX Security Features – Who should pay for them?
One of the typical questions when considering NSX deployments is who should be the administrator? However this is often a two horse race, between Network and Virtualization Systems Administrators. Although NSX is SDN (software defined networking), the driver behind much of what it does is due to security requirements, using vlans to segregate layer two networks, [...]
NSX – Availability and Redundancy
vSphere administrators normally have two great fears, failure of Storage and failure in the network layer, as both of these can result in 100s or 1000s of virtual machines simultaneously going off line. Software defined networking such as NSX or vShield have the potential to bring those failures even closer to home. How has NSX been architected to make it [...]
vSphere Integrated Containers – Manageability and Security
vSphere Integrated Containers. For the last few years I’ve been noting with increasing anxiety the rise of docker and the predicted invasion of the virtualized machine environment. When VMware previewed the open source Photon platform and the vSphere Integrated Container initiates I breathed a sigh of relief that they had noticed the amassing armies of [...]
Using infrastructure qualities to assess new technology
Change is the only constant. Everything changes and nothing stands still. That is especially true of technology. Many of today’s products will be outdated in a single life cycle. As new features are added at each major release products can be completely transformed within a few short years. Technology vendors pitch themselves as solution providers, [...]
VCIX6 DCV Design – Exam Preparation Workbook
Trying to keep track of what you have read in preparing for the advanced level design exam is a task in itself. I've created a downloadable excel file that contains objectives and hyperlinks as per blueprint 3V0-622 v1.2, published on 4 December 2015 VMware Certified Advanced Professional 6 – Data Center Virtualization [...]
virtual machine cpu limit considerations
Several years ago some of VMware's most respected technical experts made recommendations against using virtual machine cpu limits. yellow-bricks limiting-your-vcpu More recently VMware stated "Resource limits on a virtual machine... form an artificial boundary... you need to take the possible impact into consideration before applying limits to either memory or CPU." Impact of virtual machine CPU resource [...]
VMware PowerCLI Script Library
I'm moving scripts to GitHub Mainly because it's cool, but the formatting of scripts in wordpress is horrible, and I need to revisit most as I found mistakes in some, what's in GitHub has been recently tested https://github.com/raoconnor Get-ByBlueFolders Series Many of us divide services or customers using blue folders, typically in a [...]
NSX Lab Series
Network Virtualization is challenging for those of us coming from a systems admin background. In this series of posts there are lots of diagrams, so you can see the layout of hosts, network switches, controllers, and understand the traffic flows, and routing requirements If you are a visual learner like me, then I hope you [...]
Surviving a security audit
The main point of a security audit is not to try and strangle the auditor, he is just doing his job, although you might think he is there to make your life impossible. I have put together a collection of posts, the configuration settings are all publicly available, mainly from VMware's Hardening Guide, so there [...]