Sam McGeown

DefinIT was started back in 2007, originally under the name www.mcgeown.co.uk , by Sam McGeown . At the time it was just a self-learning and self-documentation exercise, but after few short months Sam started noticing an increasae in traffic and that people were commenting on the posts he wrote. From that point on the blog became about helping other people who were hitting the same problems.

Fast forward to 2011 and Sam invited Simon Eady to join and co-author on the site, creating a wider set of expertise but still with the same goal of sharing the knowledge and helping people just like us.

Well… it’s been a while.

I looked back and realised the last time I posted here was July 2022—almost three years ago! It’s hard to believe how quickly that time has flown. Consider this post a signal of intent: I’m planning to start publishing content here once again.

So, why did I stop?

It’s a fair question. The truth is, I didn’t stop creating content—I just stopped publishing it here.

It’s hard to believe that my first VMworld was almost 9 years ago! I feel very blessed to have attended in 2014 (EU) , 2015 (EU) , 2016 (US) , 2017 (EU) , 2018 (my first as an employee), 2019 (my first time as a speaker!), and virtually in 2020 and 2021.

Over the years VMworld has been hugely formative in my career, I’ve talked many times before about how the trajectory of my career really took off when I got involved with the London VMUG, and how that led to being awarded vExpert in 2013. Through the vExpert programme, I got my first blogger pass for VMworld, and from there the networking opportunities led to certification, career advances, and ultimately making the contacts (and friends) that got me in the door at VMware. It’s hard to overstate how much VMworld has helped over the years.

In my previous post I walked through configuring kubernetes ingress with automatically generated SSL certificates and DNS registration using Tanzu Kubernetes Grid’s Packages. Another of the packaged applications available is Fluent-bit, which enables log forwarding from your Kubernetes cluster and workloads to a range of supported logging endpoints.

There are a couple of tweaks required in order to forward logs to vRealize Automation Log Insight Cloud. We need to use the HTTP output in the Fluent Bit configuration to forward the logs as a JSON payload to the Log Insight API. We also need to append an authentication header with an API key, and configure some tags so that the Tanzu Kubnernetes Grid Content Pack will pick up the logs.

So, you’ve set up your shiny new Workload Management on vSphere, created a Namespace and deployed a cluster…now what?! When you deploy a workload cluster from Workload Management on vSphere 7, it comes with basic functionality, but in order to start running workloads you will inevitably need to install additional tools. That’s where Tanzu’s Packages come into play.

Tanzu’s User Managed Packages are based on a project called Carvel which:

Just recently Docker announced some new pricing tiers for it’s almost ubiquitous Docker Desktop. I’m not going to opine much on this, time will tell whether this is a company saving move or not. Suffice to say that I work for a large company and would need a subscription to continue using Docker Desktop.

The venerable Corey Quinn was on the news like a flash, so I’ll let you read his thread for some hard core snark analysis.

I can tell from the ever-increasing urgency of emails from the events team that VMworld 2021 is just around the corner!

Virtual conference event fatigue is real. I have attended and presented at many since the pandemic began, with varying levels of engagement. As an introvert, I can’t quite believe I’m saying this, but I can’t wait to get pack to meeting up with people in the real world!

The value of a conference is super-charged by the mix of dedicated time, networking opportunities and quality live content. Unfortunately for me a virtual conference tends to be diluted by distractions on-screen (and off) and is missing the key ingredient of those haphazard incidental meetups in the conference center. And whether you prefer on-demand pre-recorded content or not, for me it loses some of it’s appeal when you know the mistakes are edited out. And yes, I edit out my mistakes.

I was doing some testing with adding an external vRealize Orchestrator 8.4 endpoint to vRealize Automation Code Stream 8.4, and it turns out there’s a redirect that happens with the vRO 8.4 appliance that makes the endpoint validation fail. When you enter the URL and click ACCEPT CERTIFICATE the UI will throw an error:

Server error on getting certificates. Http failure response for https://<vRA FQDN>/codestream/api/endpoint-certificate?url=https://<vRO FQDN>: 400 Bad Request

Most of my home network runs on my Raspberry Pi Kubernetes cluster , and for the most part it’s rock solid. However, applications being applications, sometimes they become less responsive than they should (or for example, when my Synology updates itself and reboots, any mounted NFS volumes can cause the running pods to degrade in performance). This isn’t an issue with service liveliness, which can be mitigated with a liveness probe that restarts the pod if a service isn’t running.