Written by Simon Eady
on 3/1/2014After attending the “
So without further ado..
I believe in 2014, we will see an increased demand for - and usage of - hybrid clouds, especially among SMEs who are trying to avoid large investment on private clouds to accommodate high demand, short term projects.
Written by Sam McGeown
on 26/11/20132013 has been an amazing year for me – I was awarded the vExpert title, I’ve taken and passed my VCP5-DCV, VCAP5-DCA and VCAP5-DCD and spoken at the London and UK national VMUGs. I’ve attended my first VMworld and spent countless hours in the lab and on study, generating about 30 blog posts. All I can say is that it’s been a truly blessed year.
After two and a half years working as a Senior Infrastructure Analyst for a global insurance company, the time has come for a change! For a while now I’ve felt that I’ve outgrown my current role and that perhaps it was time for a change. I have worked with some really excellent people on my team while here, and I’ll definitely be sad to say goodbye to some of them! I’ve had the opportunity to work on some huge-scale environments and highly complex systems – all of which allowed me to learn and grow in ways not possible in a “normal” size environment.
Written by Sam McGeown
on 6/11/2013In my post yesterday (vexpert.me/hS) I talked about how to recover from an expired default SSO administrator password – this prompted a discussion on twitter with Anthony Spiteri (@anthonyspiteri) and Grant Orchard (@grantorchard) about the defaults for expiration and how to mitigate the risk.
The first solution is to modify the password expiration policy for SSO. I’m not advocating this necessarily – I think that expiring passwords ensure that you change them regularly and increase the overall security of your SSO solution. However, I can envisage situations (similar to mine) when the SSO administrator account is not used for a long time and expired – that causes headaches.
Written by Sam McGeown
on 5/11/2013Today I found out that in vSphere 5.1 the SSO administrator account (admin@system-domain) has a password that expires after 365 days. See KB2035864:
vCenter Single Sign-On account (SSO) passwords expire after 365 days, including the password for admin@system-domain.
Awesome.
In vSphere 5.5 it gets even better – the password expires every 90 days by default! (See the vSphere 5.5 SSO documentation)
Written by Sam McGeown
on 22/10/2013
There are different schools of thought as to whether you should have SSH enabled on your hosts. VMware recommend it is disabled. With SSH disabled there is no possibility of attack, so that’s the “most secure” option. Of course in the real world there’s a balance between “most secure” and “usability” (e.g. the most secure host is powered off and physically isolated from the network, but you can’t run any workloads ). My preferred route is to have it enabled but locked down.
Written by Sam McGeown
on 17/10/2013
Last night was the VMworld party which was loads of fun, I took some pictures so I won’t write loads! Highlights include watching people fall over on the roller disco, losing to @shogan85 at street fighter (he has some skills showing a misspent youth) and a rather amusing game of spot the difference.
#vcm5477 Cloud Service Automation with NSX and vCloud Automation Center with Cargi Keeling and Phil Fleischer
This was one of the most technically cool sessions I’ve been in this week, setting how vCAC and NSX come together to deploy multi tiered applications with the networks provisioned on demand, including firewalls and routing. There’s no doubt this is a very exciting hook up, I wonder how many network teams will be happy to see it deployed. That’s going to be an uphill battle.
Written by Sam McGeown
on 16/10/2013Today was always going to be a bit of a funny day as I scheduled the VCAP5-DCD exam for 10am this morning. I am happy to say that I passed! I’m a bit light on VMworld to report today, so forgive my DCD experience to pad it out!
Preparation
I have to confess my prep for this exam was light – I literally only watched the TrainSignal course by Scott Lowe (@scott_lowe) and just about finished that last night in the hotel! I don’t spend much time focussing on design during my day job, so I approached this exam as a bit of a learning experience rather than a serious bid to pass. I decided to book the exam here at VMworld just because you can get 75% off – if you’re funding yourself it’s not a discount to be dismissed easily!
Written by Sam McGeown
on 15/10/2013I flew from Gatwick to Barcelona last night to my very first VMworld!
I’m staying in a hotel that is actually quite far from the conference, it’s a metro, train and bus journey away from the conference center and it takes about 40 minutes to get here. On the plus side I was only 5 minutes away from the VMUG party last night so I went over there for an hour or so. Note for future years - stay a little closer to the conference!
Written by Simon Eady
on 8/10/2013It was a first for me but a really enjoyable experience.
Questions that were asked in the hour long session were..
To jump to specific questions, see the links below:
What have been your biggest successes during your time at VMware? -
Written by Sam McGeown
on 7/10/2013
Losing a root password isn’t something that happens often, but when it does it’s normally a really irritating time. I have to rotate the password of all hosts once a month for compliance, but sometimes a host drops out of the loop and the root password gets lost. Fortunately, as the vpxuser is still valid I can manage the host via vCenter - this lends itself to this little recovery process: