PowerCLI

Last Tuesday I had the privilege of presenting an introduction to the NSX APIs on vBrownBag EMEA - you can view the recording below or on vBrownBag’s youtube channel.

During the presentation I showed a mind map of the API, which I’ve made

available on GitHub in PDF format

I’ve also published the Postman collection and environment I used during the demonstration, which covers some basic configuration and deploy tasks:

This was as I expected, the busiest day sessions wise for me. There was so much good stuff I had to be a little ruthless on what I wanted and or needed to attend while also wanting to get into the solutions exchange.

Also at the end of the day the customer appreciate party was scheduled so that was something I was looking forward to a great deal (Hint - Kaiser Chiefs)

Sunday

Arriving in early on Sunday as the local flight choices are more limited from Bristol than perhaps a larger Airport, very fortunate to have a hotel so close to the VMworld venue, perhaps not so great for the evening activities but I am happy with it this way around.

Other than registration (4pm-8pm) and hopefully catching up with a few folk who have also arrived early.

In the evening I had the pleasure to meet many awesome people from the vCommunity.

VMware vSAN 2017 Specialist Exam

I always like to take a discounted exam at VMworld, this year I opted for the VMware vSAN 2017 Specialist exam, which was released a few weeks ago. Having delivered quite a few vSAN based solutions over the last few years, I was fairly confident in the blueprint. I am pleased to say that I passed the exam with a score of 422, way higher than I expected! I thought the exam itself was fair, and covered and tested the basics of vSAN well. You definitely need to know the supported architectures and how storage policies effect and apply to the data on vSAN.

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.

Time to publish the recording for the 11th episode of the vROps Webinar Series. This time we were joined by Vinith Menon who spoke about getting more from your vROps builds with PowerCLI. Vinith demonstrated the many useful ways of leveraging PowerCLI to manage your vROps environments and also communicate with the vROps API.

Huge thanks to Vinith Menon for presenting this excellent session.

So without further ado, here is the recording for this session:

Another month has gone and Christmas is now looming large! It 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 getting more out of vRealize Operations Manager using PowerCLI.

This session we will be joined by Vinith Menon who will show us all kinds of PowerCLI goodness.

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!

Recently I have been looking at William Lam ’s excellent post on automating the deployment of vROps.

After having a play around with it, to suit my own needs, I made some modifications to the Powershell script so it would support distributed switches.

# William Lam

# Edited by Simon Eady to support vDS

# www.virtuallyghetto.com

# Deployment of vRealize Operations Manager 6.0 (vROps)

On the 3rd of June we had our second South West UK VMUG  and I am pleased to say it went superbly well.

As before we held it at the Mshed facilities in Bristol.

We had a great day with many sessions from sponsors,vendors and community speakers alike!

Big thanks go to our speakers that day who were..