Just under two months ago I left my role at Xtravirt and started life as a contractor. At that point I was content to live the contractor life for a year or so and see what opportunities came along. I didn’t expect opportunity to come along so quickly!

TLDR; I’m joining VMware as part of the PSO NSX practice!

I’ve seen VMware as the place that I would end up working for a while now, having worked as a customer and a partner it seemed like a logical progression. And NSX is a rocket-ship that is gathering speed and momentum, it’s viewed by many as critical to the future of VMware as the public cloud begins to eat the more traditional datacenter. With so much focus on NSX at VMworld this year, I am convinced of this.

In this coming episode, Sunny will DIVE DEEP into the interesting topic of introducing automation into operations.

While we all know that, automating day to day operations tasks is becoming the choice of an IT organization, it is hard for them to find a solution which can completely understand their business policies and provide them the efficiency they need from automating simple operational tasks.

Based on our research, we found that, one of the most time consuming activity done by an Virtual Infrastructure Administrator is to juggle resources between the changing business requirements and ensure that every VM which is being hosted in their environment is BEING SERVED WELL.

Having missed last years VMworld I feel very ready for attending the EMEA VMworld in Barcelona.

I almost felt annoyed about missing last year as the big announcements really caused a stir in the community and wider afield. (VMware on AWS) The announcements from the US VMworld this year were equally exciting so I am very keen to hear what else VMware has planned to reveal in a Barcelona.

I have put a good deal of effort into planning what I will be doing and attending to maximise my time there without burnout (Veterans I hear you laughing)

[vRealize Operations Manager 6.6, which was recently released by VMware.

We started with an overview of all the cool new stuff and then drill down into individual areas. We then jumped into a Live Demo as usual to see the new features in action.

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As a consultant I’ve had the opportunity to design, install and configure dozens of production vRealize Automation deployments, from reasonably small Proof of Concept environments to globally-scaled multi-datacenter fully distributed behemoths. It’s fair to say, that I’ve made mistakes along the way - and learned a lot of lessons as to what makes a deployment a success.

In the end, pretty much everything comes down to getting the pre-requisites right. Nothing that I’ve written here is not already documented in the official documentation, and the installation wizard does a huge amount of the work for you.

I’ve been working for Xtravirt for over 3 and a half years now, first as a Senior Consultant, and more recently as a Lead Consultant. During that time I’ve had the opportunity to work with some excellent people, some fantastic customers and some huge projects. I’ve developed and grown as a consultant and architect, achieved multiple VCP and VCAP qualifications, and VMware’s elite VCDX certification. For all of this, and for the opportunities and support they have provided, I am thankful to Xtravirt and to all of my colleagues who helped along the way.

Welcome to the next episode of vRealize Operations Manager Webinar Series. This time around we will talk about the latest release of vROps released in the month of June.

With this release, VMware has made drastic changes to the product and the initial reviews of the product have been great. Since I was a part of the team delivering this new release, I thought it would be a good topic to discuss in the next episode of the Webinar Series.

The Host Resources Deep Dive book by Frank Denneman and Niels Hagoort has been one of the most widely anticipated books in the VMware community - previous deep dive books by Frank (co-authored with Duncan Epping), tantalising blog posts and captivating presentations have whet the appetite for the last year or so. Having sat through some of these presentations at VMUGs and VMworld I can tell you the depth and understanding that the authors bring to the table is immense.

With the release of vSphere 6.5, VMware upped the game for vCenter High Availability (vCHA) and introduced an active/passive/witness cluster setup to provide a failover cluster for vCenter Server Appliances. The diagram below shows the architecture of the solution.

Deploying vCHA can be done in two modes - “Basic” and “Advanced”. You can use Basic mode if the vCenter you want to be HA is managing the hosts it resides on - in this scenario the wizard configures your vCenter and deploys the Passive and Witness nodes for you. If you have a management cluster for your vCenter Server, or you are deploying a nested environment, you need to use the advanced mode - in this scenario you must configure your active node, deploy clones for the passive and witness nodes, then enable the configuration.

[<img class=“alignright size-thumbnail wp-image-8035” src="/images/2017/03/logo.jpg" alt="" width=“150” height=“150” which vROps can provide by using various extensibility solutions.

We discussed the following use cases and demonstrated them in live environments:

Use Case 1 - Full-Stack vSphere Monitoring. From application to Infrastructure.

Use Case 2 - Amazon RDS Workloads. Monitoring public cloud workloads with vROps.

Use Case 3 - vROps Extensibility. Metrics, Logs and Costing come together along with other 3rd party extensibility options.