Configuration

This time around Iwan Rahabok will lead the next session of the vROps Webinar Series while Sunny and myself will support him to deliver some awesome content which Iwan has developed over the past few months.

Yes, this time around we will move our focus from vROps as a Product and related features to the concept of running your SDDC operations with vRealize Operations Dashboards. Just to clarify, this is not a session where we will teach you to create dashboards, but this is a session where we would share how a set of Customised Dashboards can help any organisation’s IT to get an insight into Storage, Network & Compute within your SDDC. While vROps is primarily a Performance Management and Capacity Planning tool, we will take you to the other important aspects as well such as Availability and Configuration.

With the release of vCAC 6.1 there have been some great improvements in the setup of the clustered vCAC appliances - none of the previous copying of configuration files between appliances - just a simple wizard to do it all for you. In my opinion this is superb.

You’ll need to have deployed a load balancer of some sort - vCAC 6.0 build-out to distributed model – Part 3.1: Configure Load Balancing with vCNS or vCAC 6.0 build-out to distributed model – Part 3.2: Configure load balancing with NSX

As a little learning project, I thought I’d take on Simon’s previous post about backing up ESXi configurations and extend it to vCenter Orchestrator (vCO), and document how I go about building up a workflow. I’m learning more and more about vCO all the time, but I found it has a really steep entry point, and finding use cases is hard if you haven’t explored capabilities.

In 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.