Wednesday I had lined up several sessions so I was quick to get along to my first session - Operational Remediation with vRealize Operations… Tying it All Together - #MGT5735. The session was excellent and gave a great overview and introduction to what is possible with remediation in vROps 6.1. Big thanks to Chima Njaka for this session. Aside from a few other sessions I spent a lot of the afternoon in the VMUG lounge with my colleagues from @xtravirt (see pic below) and meeting lots of other folk from the around the globe (this is what makes this conference so very great for me), putting faces to twitter handles for the first time and so on.

@vaficionado) – if that list of names doesn’t fill you with confidence for vRA.Next, then I suggest you follow them on twitter and trust me that it’s a crack team! So, my highlights: Completely automated deployment…almost. The deployment of appliances and installation of IaaS components and pre-requisites will be wizard driven, the Window Servers will need to exist and have an agent installed, and the MSSQL server will also need to be installed.

The first full day of VMworld after PEX was a busy one. After the keynote (highlights were the docker announcements) I was on “booth babe” duty at the VMUG lounge. It was great to meet so many folk who were existing VMUG members and leaders as well as prospective new members. If you are at VMworld this year you should definitely stop by! After lunch I hit the solutions exchange to catch up with a few vendors whom I had a few queries for also took the time to collect the #vExpert hoodie from @simplivity and the #vExpert tile from Tegile (thank you!

My trip started with a farcical attempt to fly – my 11:50am flight on Sunday didn’t leave ‘til 3:30pm, but in light of William Lam’s travel woes on the same day, I don’t think I’ll complain to heavily. After a quick stop off at the Fira to register and grab my VMworld bag and I headed off to meet DefinIT co-author Simon (@simoneady) at our AirBnB apartment (which, by the way is awesome and a whole load cheaper than a hotel).

For the last few years at VMworld I’ve taken advantage of the discounted exam price and booked a “have-a-go” exam – typically an exam I’ve been wanting to do but not necessarily had the time I wanted to study for it. Since I have been fairly immersed in the NSX world for the last week, sitting in an NSX design and deploy class and surrounded by some very smart networking guys, I changed my “have-a-go” exam from the VCP6-CMA to the VCIX-NV.

It’s PEX (Partner Exchange Day) at VMworld today so its busy but not the Tuesday (first day) of VMworld busy, last night saw a fantastic #vRockstar party and a great chance to meet and have a beer with many vTwitteratti. Today of course has been largely overshadowed by the big new concerning the Dell announcement to purchase EMC which has triggered a great deal of discussion and a healthy amount of banter and snark!

As a vExpert, I am blessed to get 1000 CPU hours access to Ravello’s awesome platform and recently I’ve been playing with the AutoLab deployments tailored for Ravello. If you’re unfamiliar with Ravello’s offering (where have you been?!) then it’s basically a custom hypervisor (HVX) running on either AWS or Google Cloud that allows you to run nested environments on those platforms. I did say it’s awesome. As an avid home-lab enthusiast Ravello initially felt weird, but having used it for a while I can definitely see the potential to augment, and in some cases completely replace the home lab.

Recently the team I am working with came across an interesting bug/issue with actions missing from deployed VMs. We had checked and double checked the entitlements yet the actions that should be available to the end-user/customer were not listed. Everything appeared to point to a permissions issue until one of the team members noticed something with regards to blueprints in the catalog. Before I continue with what we observed and how we “fixed” it please bear in mind the blueprints were created programmatically.

[<img class=“alignright size-medium wp-image-3968” src="/images/2014/02/pernixdata1.png" alt=“pernixdata” width=“300” height=“80” since vSphere 6 was released, simply because I can’t afford to wait on learning new versions until 3rd party software catches up. It makes you truly appreciate the awesome power of FVP, even on my less than spectacular hardware in my lab, when it’s taken away for a while. Now that FVP 3.0 has GA’d, I’m looking forward to getting my lab storage accelerated - it makes a huge difference.

I must admit I have been quite keen to get a look at vROps 6.1 so I was quick to upgrade my lab from 6.0 to 6.1 (with not problems I might add) and have a good look at the new bits and pieces. The bits I will cover briefly in this post are.. Upgrading from 6.0 EPO functionality Dashboards Automated actions (ON?) Upgrading from 6.0 Ensure you upgrade the OS of the appliance first (if you have one) - vRealize Operations Manager - Virtual Appliance Operating System upgrade (vRealize_Operations_Manager-VA-OS-6.