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I get this question a lot, or I think the conversation is about one solution and it ends up being about the other. In this post I will very simply describe both solutions. This is not a 10 pager here, super simple so you can keep this as a handy Continue reading →

In the previous guide we installed and configured Harbor on Photon OS.  In this guide I will walk you through testing that your Harbor registry installation is working and you can push images to it. Pre-Reqs Harbor Registry already installed see my guide here Photon OS with at least 1 Continue reading →

In this guide I will show you how to install the latest release of VMware Harbor Registry on Photon OS Pre-Reqs Photon OS with at least 1 vCPU 2GB RAM and at least 5GB storage – vSphere OVA Here Internet Access from Photon OS to the internet A quite place Continue reading →

In the previous guide we installed and configured Harbor to use S3 backed storage.  In this guide I will walk you through testing that your Harbor registry installation is being backed by S3 storage. Pre-Reqs Harbor Registry already installed and backed by S3 storage see my guide here Photon OS Continue reading →

In this guide I will show you how to configure your Harbor registry to use S3 as the storage backend for image repositories. This will allow you to consume S3 storage instead of local storage or a docker volume for images pushed to the Harbor registry. Pre-Reqs Photon OS with Continue reading →

It’s that time again and this year we are back in Vegas baby! Help me get to VMworld again this year by voting for my speaking sessions. I had a great turnout last year and appreciate the huge support I received. Containers 101 for the vSphere Admin [1466] and Setting Continue reading →

In this guide I will walk you though a simple installation of vSphere Integrated Containers so you can try it in your own lab or data center. This is meant for evaluation and learning, production installations may require a different configuration. Pre-Reqs Create or obtain a vCenter Server instance with Continue reading →

In this guide I will show you how to install and get started with the vRealize Cloud Client command line tool. Pre-Reqs An installation of vRealize Automation 7 see my guide here Download the latest vRealize Cloud Client from here Download and install the latest Java Run Time for you Continue reading →

In this guide I will walk you through how to change that pesky All Services icon to one of your choice. Pre-Reqs vRealize Automation 7.2 or newer installed and configured See my guide here A Linux system with a command line that you can run curl from to connect to Continue reading →

Your Daily Dose of Cloud and Virtualization

I have been so busy I haven’t had time to put any articles together in quiet some time.  I know many if not all of you have the same issue.  Never enough time in a day to do all the things you need to get done and the back log just keeps piling up.  Every […]

vRealize CloudClient 4.3 What’s new? Support for the vRealize Automation 7.2 capability to assign all users of a business group to an entitlement or to delete an inactive entitlement. The new vra catalogitem service unassign command enables you to remove a service from a catalog item. CloudClient’s truststore password can now be set by the user. As […]

As you may have guessed along with the release of vRA 7.2 VMware  also release vRealize Business for Cloud 7.2. What’s New in this release? Enhanced support for AWS via AWS Cloud Watch API Integration Visibility into all AWS regions and services Ability to automatically reconfigure new services Enhanced Reporting via Richer OOTB report with […]

While I was away on vacation last week it seems VMware had another exciting round of releasing starting with the Release of vRA 7.2.  Probably the most anticipated feature is the new Azure Endpoint.  Although this is a very exciting feature there are some other very exciting enhancements as well.  Enhancements to the API, container […]

Still running vRA 6.x, then you will be happy to hear vRA 6.2.5 is now GA and boast some great performance improvements.  See blow for more details. GA Date:11/17/16  What’s new? Enhancements Hotfix Management with toggle feature. SCVMM 2012 R2 support. Enforce lease maximum. Option to hide price and cost with toggle feature. Thick Eager […]

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Awesomeness. Today Nutanix announced the addition of HPE Proliant rack mount servers as a H/W platform. In addition, we expanded the Cisco UCS platform to include B-series. Also, customers will soon have the choice of a new purchasing model called “Nutanix Go”. This will be focused on opex and shorter term consumption models, similar to … Continue reading Nutanix Adds HPE, Cisco-B, and Go Consumption Model →

Hi everyone. It has been a while since my last post, and the title of this very post is the reason why. Sorry. No excuse. I just wanted to highlight a few things from my first year at Nutanix. Here goes: Culture – The company culture is second to none. From my peers, to the … Continue reading My First Year at Nutanix – WOW!!! →

I’ve been wanting to make this post for quite some time, but having recently moved to Nutanix, I’ve been drinking from the “proverbial firehose” for a bit longer than I would have expected 🙂 I’ve been working as an SE since I left corp IT for almost 10 years now. It has been absolutely fantastic, … Continue reading How to be an SE – My Guiding Principles →

A disclaimer before we get started. First, if you are expecting an epic “battle of the hypervisors” article, then please move on. This is going to be a multi-part series as I attempt to explore the viability of AHV (Acropolis Hypervisor) in the market place for a variety of use cases. Secondly, this is a … Continue reading Andreopoulos on Acropolis Part 1 →

I’ve played the Vienna for a couple decades now, and I’ve had fantastic results. Here is a little miniature in one of the lines I get from time to time. Black gets a bit greedy and thinks he is pickup on a loose pawn, but in fact, his position isn’t great.

I submitted 2 VMworld sesssions this year, along with my colleague in crime Chris Lennon. I think public voting will be opened up very shortly but here is all you have to do: Connect to http://www.vmworld.com/uscatalog.jspa and login. You must register if you don’t already have a login. In the search field, find both of my … Continue reading Vote for My VMworld Sessions! →

Today, VMware officially released our vRealize Orchestrator Plugin for Chef. You can find it on the Solutions Exchange Here: Chef Plugin for vRO   I had a couple customers beta test this and it works very nicely. Enjoy!

With the release of vRealize Automation 7.0 comes some fantastic goodies including the new Event Broker system for providing integration and extensibility. Although I thought our previous methods with vRA 6.x and vRO were great, Event Broker just makes life so much easier. Let me explain....

Just want to throw a quick shout out to my buddy and co-worker Ryan Kelly at VMware. He runs a fantastic cloud blog over at vmtocloud , and I piggy backed as a guest blogger from time to time on topics related to vcac (vRealize Automation), vCO/vRO (orchestrator), and ServiceNow. Here is a link to my ServiceNow post … Continue reading vmtocloud →

Where we aim to keep cloud, well... RELEVANT!

As some of you may know, I recently worked to build  a set of remediation actions for the new vROps 6.x. After several months of work, testing, and documenting the solution it has gone live in the VMware Solutions Exchange. The solution can be found here. https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/store/products/vro-solution-and-workflow-package-for-vrealize-operations-manager#.VRL2sUYSkkc An updated blog article will be coming to […]

I just discovered yet another time bomb issue in vCAC/vRA 6.x. There is a 1yr expiration time bomb in the VAMI root account. This will prevent you from logging in to the VAMI console(trying to update to 6.2??). To fix, log in to the console/putty/ssh, and then run this command… chage –M 99999 root Even […]

In certain situations, like doing DNS Aliasing for multi domain environments, the fqdn of the vm may not match what is registered in DNS for name resolution, and therefore the  RDP link in the Day Two actions of the vCAC will not work. The good news, our friends in R&D thought of this situation. You […]

When you try to set the timezone in AppD it stays set to UTC time. Simply run this command directly from the AppD console or SSH session. (Note OOTB you cannot SSH to AppD, so you must ssh as darwin_user, and su root) “ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York /etc/localtime”

When installing the gugent and deploying a VM with vCAC 6.0.x you may have noticed that the guest agent gets stuck in a “loop” where it continually re-runs the “wait.vbs” script. This is because the guest agent cannot successfully talk back to the vCAC Server. While working on a cusomer PoC I uncovered a bug […]

I’ve noticed a few times, where I was working with customers to setup vCAC, and while configuring the tenants and attaching the Identity store I would add users as tenant and Infrastructure admins(or just plain users for that matter. But, when the users try to log on, the vCAC portal just flashes and comes back […]

You may have noticed at times, when you do a new install of vCAC, you go to entitle all of the various “Day Two Actions” for a VM. Things like Destroy, reset, Power Off… but the list is glaringly short!!! This means that during the install, not all actions were registered with the vCAC Cafe. […]

Over the past several months I have noticed that people seem to have a hard time with installing vCAC 6.x. While it may seem an arduous task it is really pretty straightforward, IF all of the basics are covered. I have helped several team members over the past few weeks fix install/config issues and they […]

First up is the WinRM setup on your PowerShell host.    Remember these are to be executed on the Windows box that you wish to run the PowerShell script from. We will add the below commands to our customization spec that we use for our WIndows blueprints To create a winrm listener and open any […]

As many of you know, out of the blue, my lab pod that had been running since the GA of  6.0 suddenly died without warning. I was unable to log in to my tenant, it would just  take my credentials and then refresh back to a blank log in page. After digging deep with support […]

Time for another new adventure at VMware, again...Today is is my last day on the National Cloud Management Specialist Team.  As of Monday, I take my new role as a Cloud Foundation Architect along side 3 other bad-ass colleagues to form the Cloud Foundation Specialist Team covering North America. Our team will be focused on evangelism, customer adoption, and product/service direction of Cloud Foundation and SDDCaaS in close collaboration with the Cloud Platform Business Unit at VMware. 

Come see us at VMworld this year in Vegas.  If you are interested in what VMware is doing in the container space, come see Adam Osterholt, Gary Coburn, Martijn Baecke and I and attend a few of our sessions...

This morning , I did a guest post on dailyhypervisor about the recent update on the Platypus Project and I figured that I would do a quick run through on consuming the docker image and playing with the variables.Working with Platypus is pretty simple; let's use vRealize Operations 6.2 as an example below.

In December, I created a VMware AppCatalyst Lab Installer Script which automated the install of Homebrew, Ansible, Packer, Python, VMware AppCatalyst, Docker Toolbox and Vagrant. This lab installer also include a customized docker-machine with the VMware AppCatalyst driver included. I got to thinking, what if someone just wanted a local lab without AppCatalyst and just wanted the native experience with Docker Toolbox and Kitematic? 

Yesterday, Grant and Roman released their platypus project, which is essentially a very simple and elegant way to provide vRA 7 users the ability to explore it's API without the need to connect to a vRA 7 instance. I personally needed this for another project that I am working on with a colleague so I needed to give this a shot as soon as I can. 

Last night I received an email that I was anticipating for a while, I was selected to be an Ambassador in VMware's CTO Ambassador Program for the 2016 and 2017 tenure.  Needless to say, I am pretty pumped about the opportunity to contribute back to a community that have a special passion for. 

My first 3 years at VMware have been a hell of a ride so far. After starting out as an Account SE covering Enterprise accounts in Calgary and the Prairies, I moved into a Cloud Specialist role covering Western Canada. Looking back on the last few years seems like a blur, after working with so many great customers, colleagues and partners I have gotten used to the extremely fast pace of the company and technology solutions that we deliver to the field.  I have a feeling that I am only just starting down the road of 'fast paced' due to the new role and new specialization that I am moving into. 

Containerization uses the kernel on the host operating system to run multiple root file systems.  Each root file system is called a container, each container also has it's own processes, memory, devices and network stack. For more on Containers, see my Containers 101 post. As mentioned in that previous post, Docker has built a very strong ecosystem and simple way of consuming and using containers.  Let's take a look at a couple basics for docker and work from there. 

What are Containers? Containers are an OS-level virtualization method in which the kernel of an operating system allows for multiple isolated user-space instances, instead of just one. The primary benefits of using containers include limited overhead, increased flexibility and efficient use of storage; the container looks like a regular OS instance from the user's perspective. Changes to the image can be made very quickly and pushed to a repository to share with others for further development and utilization. 

The very idea of 3rd Platform is disruptive to the majority of IT shops because it is a radical paradigm shift that transitions from a device centric to a solution orientated approach.  While the 1st platform was designed around mainframes and the 2nd platform was designed around client-server, the 3rd platform is designed around the cloud. In other words, applications are designed and built to live in the cloud. We can e ectively think of this as pushing many of the core infrastructure concepts (like availability and scale) into the architecture of the application itself with containers being a large part of this; they can be thought of as lightweight runtimes for these applications. With proper application architecture and a rock solid foundation either on-premise or in the cloud, applications can scale on demand, new versions can be pushed quickly, components can be rebuilt and replaced easily, as well as many other benefits discussed below.