When I started my blog back in May 2007 (12 years ago!) I was running Wordpress, then switched to DotNetNuke, then BlogEngine, then finally back to Wordpress - which I’ve used since 2010. Today I’ve cut over to a new architecture based on Hugo and hosted on AWS using a combination of Route53, Cloudfront and S3. Why the change? If it ain’t broke… You may well ask why I’ve made the move, or you may not…I’m going to tell you anyway…

I recently upgraded an instance of vRA from 7.2 to 7.5 and rather than do it the manual way I used VMware’s vRealize LifeCycle Manager (version 2.0 update 3). Everything was going great and according to plan, the vRLCM pre-requisites checker made short work of all of the checks you need to do before you start an upgrade of vRA. You can see below vRLCM does a great job of keeping you informed of the current progress and in a really elegant way.

Most vSphere admins are more than comfortable with using Update Manager to download patches and update their environment, but few that I talk to actually know a huge amount about the Update Mangaer Download Service (UMDS). UMDS is tool you can install to download patches (and third party VIBs - I’ll get to that) for Update Manager and it’s useful for environments that don’t have access to the internet, or air-gapped, and also for environments with multiple vCenter Servers where you don’t necessarily want to download the same patch on every server.

It has been a few years since I read (and lost) a great article on career progression and personal insight. That article helped me relax into who I am from a professional point of view, but it also challenged me. I have been in IT for over 20 years now and in truth the first 10 years were not so great (perhaps a story for another time) but it was when I stumbled upon the vCommunity by way of Twitter and then subsequently I attended my first VMUG (in London) which completely challenged and changed my way of thinking and approach to my career.

For the last month I had been preparing for the VCAP7-CMA Design exam and I am very glad to say I passed on my first attempt. Oddly I found it slightly easier than the VCP7-CMA but that I suspect is down to the fact I spend a lot of my time designing and implementing solutions for customers as opposed to day to day administration of any given solution. So what was the exam like?

This series was originally going to be a more polished endeavour, but unfortunately time got in the way. A prod from James Kilby (@jameskilbynet) has convinced me to publish as is, as a series of lab notes. Maybe one day I’ll loop back and finish them… Requirements Routing Because I’m backing my vCloud Director installation with NSX-T, I will be using my existing Tier-0 router, which interfaces with my physical router via BGP.

It has been a while since I have had time to write a blog post, the last quarter of last year was pretty crazy from a work point of view. Regardless, it is now a New Year and my tech focus is turning very much on CMP related things particularly vRealize Automation. (I am also very much looking forward to learning more about VMware’s CaS which I saw demo’d at the UK VMUG late last year by Grant Orchard)

Just a quick post today to cover a new vRO action and workflow I’ve uploaded to GitHub that configures vCenter High Availability in the basic mode. This is based on William Lam’s excellent PowerShell module that does the same, but using vRO. I also hope to release a version for the advanced mode based on my PowerShell script in the near future. TL;DR - package is availabile on GitHub The workflow itself is pretty self explanatory, with my deployment action, which returns a VC:Task, and the standard “wait for a task to end” action.

I did a quick search online and could not find a collated list so, by way of a quick summary from all the VMworld 2018 announcements and comments my good friend and PM for vRealize Operations Sunny Dua has made, I have collated a list of what we can expect to see in the next iteration of vROps (7.0). The list is in no order of interest or importance, some of the mentioned improvements have been long standing requests so enjoy and get hyped (I know I am).

I recently started looking into ways of monitoring the temperature and humidity in my garage - for two reasons. Firstly, I have my lab workload cluster out there in the form of a Dell C6100, and I’ve noticed with the recent weather that the temperature in there gets…a bit warm. Secondly, I like to brew beer at home, and one of the keys to a good brew is consistent temperature!