Recently I’ve been working on some ideas in my lab to leverage the AWS endpoint on vRealize Automation. One of the things I needed to get working was getting Software Components working on my AWS deployed instances.

The diagram to the right shows my end-stage network - the instance deployed by vRA into AWS should be in a private subnet in my VPC, and should use my local lab DNS server and be able to access my vRA instance. This allows me to make use of the vRA guest agent for software components on the deployed VMs. I also wanted to have the deployed VMs use their local NAT gateway for internet traffic, rather than paying for the data over my VPN connection.

When you’re working with Amazon and vRealize Automation Software Components, one of the requirements is for the Guest Agent (gugent) to talk back to the vRealize Automation APIs - the gugent polls the API for tasks it should perform, downloads them from the API and executes them, then updates the tasks with a status.

This means that Virtual Machines deployed as EC2 instances in an AWS VPC require the ability to talk back to internal corporate networks - not something you’d want to publish on the internet! That’s where AWS’s VPN connections come in - you can create several types of VPN that allow such communication over a secure (encrypted) virtual private network.

So the other day my Skype account was briefly compromised, a successful login from Russia (after digging through activity logs) and this was after many attempts from IP addresses all around the world (China, Korea, Argentina the list goes on). You can see from the picture below the successful login attempt.

My initial reaction was stress and panic, as I didn’t know precisely where I had been compromised I ran scans on my local machines while resetting passwords a plenty. Once I had calmed down a bit and reviewed where I had gone wrong I set about uping my game.

If you have been following and enjoying the vROps Webinar series both Sunny and I have been running this year you may find it useful to know Sunny has put all the slide decks up and availble in one place for you to download and share if you so wish.

vROps Webinar Series Slide Decks

Enjoy and share the knowledge!

If you have any questions or comments just drop either Sunny or myself a comment on our respective blogs or contact us on twitter.

I was asked recently if there were any materials I could direct people to with regards to expanding existing vROps deployments. I did a brief search on the web to see what material was “out there” on how to perform what is a straight forward task. To my surprise very little came up. So I have decided to create this guide with all the things you need to consider when you are going to either expand or need to remove a node from one of your active vROps deployments.

Time to publish the recording for the 10th episode of vROps Webinar Series. This time around we spoke about vRealize Operations Manager Resful API and how to use it. Post 20 minutes of slide-ware, I jumped into the lab and thanks to the demo god, we demonstrated a number of use cases and browsed through the documentation to make it easier for you to consume and use the same.

Big thanks to @sunny_dua  for doing the session while I was MIA you are a legend buddy!

The month has been extremely busy but we still want to continue with the momentum of webinar series getting to the business end of the year. This time around we will talk about vRealize Operations Manager API. API is your friend if you are trying to automate things which you would normally do on GUI. While GUI is a favourite of most, the geeks prefer the API since that helps them to programatically initiate tasks and go out for a coffee. By the time they are back from the LONG coffee break, the work is done 🙂

I have been musing this a little while and decided to write this post/rant/opinion post, feel free to post your thoughts and opinions in the comments.

OK so here it is, one thing I have observed for a good while now is how much noise there is about how -you- should be in the cloud (Public) and if you are not you’re already dead.

I call Bull****!

Public, Hybrid and Private clouds are solutions not final destinations, regardless of whether you are a customer, partner, or any other third thing you should be purely focused on what is best for you or (if you provide IT services) your customer. It is plainly obvious to me that in -all- of the customers I have visited there has been no appetite or reason to mass adopt any single one solution/option as it simply would not fit how they do business and function day to day. There will of course be exceptions to this rule but they are indeed exceptions not the norm.

So, this is something I’ve been waiting to write up for a while! PowerShell for macOS has been available for a while now, but what a lot of PowerCLI fans have been waiting for is to be able to use PowerCLI direct from their Mac.

Today, amidst all of the noise from VMWorld, PowerCLI Core dropped as a Fling! That means that although it’s not ready for production use yet, it is ready to start testing - and I’m way more excited than I should be!

I was having a chat with my Dad recently, about how those who work in IT keep their skills up to date. He is now retired but had spent 25+ years in the IT business so I always value his opinion. What occurred to me while we chewed the fat was the following.

If there is one thing we can be sure of in IT, it is that change will happen and faster than we think.</cliche quote>