New VMware Fling – Autopology (Drag and Drop NSX Network Topologies? Yes Please!)
The VMware Fling labs is one of my favourite things, as it brings some awesome new tech straight from VMware R&D. Some of these flings flow to the product cycles (remember the HTML5 client, now default in vCenter?). And they did it again! Ever since…
Monitor hybrid, multi-cloud architectures with the new Microsoft Azure Management Pack for vROPS
Digital transformation is accelerating as more and more enterprises work to create and innovate by taking advantage of cloud. Research shows that in the near future, over 90% of enterprises plan to use hybrid, multi-cloud architectures to provide the type of cost, effective, flexibility and…
5 Tips for Infrastructure Hardening
While compiling this blog post last couple of weeks this weekend all hell broke loose! A large-scale ransomware attack was launched against users of any Windows system worldwide. Showing us that security is all about a pre-care balance between protection and usability. Running your infrastructure in…
Patches and Updates – Usefull Resources for Lifecyle Management
Updates, patches and more updates. How do you keep track? How do you decide if a patch is critical for you and when you need to install it? How do you even know there is an update? In the field I see a lot of…
vRealize Automation failed requests monitoring
When working with vRealize Automation, monitoring the requests tab on the tenant portal can be really usefull. Knowing when a workflow fails for a tenant and act on this as soon as possible, can raise your tenant happiness. Keeping an eye out for failed requests…
Exporting your Amazon Kindle Highlights & Notes to MySQL
As a wise man said; now for something completely different. This post is going to be just that. I received a Amazon Kindle on christmas and absolutely love it. It has replaced hauling around a bunch of physical books and made my life a lot…
Why Upgrade to ESX 6.x? Snapshot handling!
A lot of organisations are still on older versions of VMware vSphere. I see ESXi deployments in the field which run on version 4.1, 5.0 and 5.5 regularly. When I ask them why they do not upgrade, I get all sorts of answers. The most…
Correctly sizing your VMware infrastructure
A lot as been writting about sizing VMware environments. There are various opinions and ideas, like: Use the reference guide or architecture, then you’re safe Follow the sizing guides from the vendors you need to monitor the current workloads to correctly size your environment. Do…
How to run Containers as a Service – Part 2
In ‘How to run Containers as a Service – Part 1‘ I talked about how easy it is to run containers in a development environment and the difficulty of moving containers into production. In this post I will show you how to run Containers as a Service by…
How to run Containers as a Service – Part 1
In this post I will talk about containers, why developers love them and which platform is suitable to manage and run Containers in production. For those not in the know, application containers are a way for developers to package code into executable ‘containers’. Instead of…
Control NSX using Log Insight webhooks and a Lego Mindstorms robot
[Updated 26-03: Added the NSX API call script] During the last few years we’ve had some fun demos at the Dutch VMUG Usercon. We’ve automated a coffee machine using vRealize Orchestrator. We did a vRealize Automation challenge where competitors could control a lightsaber when they…
Virtual Tool chest update: Flings and More
Most of you know the VMware labs and the flings they produce. Some flings are so good that they become part of a product. Some of them are good but remain a fling. Some of them are only useful in a handful of cases. It’s a challenge…
Powershell: VMware NSX duplicate VTEP addresses
Roughly a half year ago we came across a situation in which an VMware NSX environment was having problems consistingly applying routing and firewall rules. After some troubleshooting it appeared to be a problem with duplicate VTEP (VXLAN Tunnel Enpoint) addresses on the vSphere hosts….
Create a new database user using vRealize Automation XaaS
Recently I described how to deliver Database-as-a-Service using XaaS (Anything-as-a-Service) in vRealize Automation. In the meantime I added some add-ons to this. It’s nice to have the ability to create a new database using self-service from vRealize Automation but when the database is running, users…
Jeeves – your own VMGuru
Everyone is talking about it: Chatbots are going to be the next bing thing. If you don’t believe me, check out the Forbes article on why chatbots will be your new best friend. A quote from that article: Chatbots came on the scene in 2011…
