VMware NSX Question – Can You Figure it Out?

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I wrote a blog post in the VMware official blog about a demo I recorded called “Dynamically enforcing Security On a Hot Cloned SQL Server With VMware NSX“.

A bit long of a title but captures the essence of the demo perfectly. You can see the demo as well here:

I got a question from a colleague of mine with has a very keen eye:

“I just saw the great video you made, at 0:50 second of the demo we can see the rules for the prod app

What is the meaning of rule 6?  If the source is the datacenter and is broader than the App Server in rule 5, and the rule allows for ANY service, doesn’t it make rule 5 irrelevant? “ read more

Going For The Double

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I can’t believe i’m writing this post, I have achieved a second VCDX certification (or as it’s being referred to in the community a 2X 🙂 ). This time the design was for cloud (CMA) and it came just one year and some change after I became a VCDX DCV.

Just being a VCDX was a long time career aspiration of mine and I am so grateful I was able to work on the second one.

Short disclaimer – Since I am a VCDX panelist I am forbidden from mentoring candidates through their VCDX process or giving out advice on the design itself, this is so that I won’t give anyone an unfair advantage. I’ll keep this post about my personal experience towards achieving the double and keep the advice about the process. read more

IOPS reservations in SIOC 6 , what’s the deal?

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Storage I/O control has been available for a long time now since vSphere 4.1, if you don’t know what SIOC is you can read about it in many blogs out there, my personal favorite for anything storage is Cormac Hogan‘s blog, here is also a link to Cormac’s post about SIOC.

Some of you might have read about the new SIOC feature in vSphere 6 called IOPS reservations.

In case you didn’t let’s quickly review it, In version 5.5 VMware introduced a new scheduler call mClock, this I/O scheduler is more efficient but also it has the capability to set I/O reservations on VMDK’s. In vSphere 6 VMware added the ability to set those reservations on the VMDK level, not through the web client but by setting the “reservation” property on the VMDK, see this post by William Lam that has a nice PowerCLI script to do this for you. read more

Samsung Note 5 review

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This is a bit of a different post than the ones on this blog, it’s not about cloud or IT,  it’s about the Samsung Note 5 I have been carrying around lately.

No, Samsung are not paying me for this post but I really love the phone so I had to give it my personal review. A short one.

I have this phone a few weeks by now, it does have a few drawbacks but my experience with it is great, it is truly the best phone I ever had! It’s fast, responsive, and has some new features that are awesome. lets elaborate in points: read more

Taking my career to the next level

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If your reading this it’s probably because you are wondering where I am heading, so I’ll start with that first: I recently accepted a new position with a bigger impact on VMware and its customers and on the IT community.

Starting OCT 1’st I will become a Staff solutions architect for Microsoft enterprise applications architecture at VMware’s Global center of excellence, focusing mainly on MS SQL running on VMware’s platforms.

Why? you may ask. Considering my current job is indeed wonderful it is a fair question. Currently I am working with the best SE specialists team in the world. My team is responsible for delivering pre-sales engagements about the most strategic solutions we have at VMware to our most strategic customers. As a cloud automation specialist I learned a lot and engaged in the most interesting conversations with customers about their Cloud needs and wants, conducted POC’s, got to work for the best manager I had the privilege to work for in my career and most importantly built strong relationships and friendships. read more

How to setup login with just the username in vRealize Automation 6.2

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Actually, “how to setup default domain in the Identity appliance using jxplorer” would probably be a better title for this post but I chose to put the emphasis on the end result to make it clearer what we are trying to achieve.

Allow me to explain:

When you login to vRA you probably noticed the default behavior requires using a full UPN login like user@domain.com , If you want to allow login with a short name there are a few ways to achieve that:

1. You can setup native AD identity source for the default tenant  as detailed here , but this only works for the default tenant and not for any additional tenants which is annoying since as a general practice we usually create additional tenants. read more

How to create “Network Selection” drop-down in vRealize Automation 6.2

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It’s been a while since I blogged, on the work front things are hectic and I am involved in many PoC’s for vRA, fun times.

I created this step by step guide for a very simple ask from a customer of creating a drop-down menu item in the service request form that allows the selection of networks in vRA 6.2.

This of course can be enhanced in different directions like displaying the networks “friendly names” instead of the actual port group names, or to populate the drop-down based on another selection for example selecting a specific datacenter will populate the right networks in the network selection drop-down etc, I will sure to create follow up posts with that. read more

VMware openness for humanity

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Last week I attended VMware’s World wide sales kick off event where all of VMware’s sales organization gathered in New Orleans to learn about the vision for the future, celebrate the wins of the past (6 Billion Revenue this year!) and network with our peers.

What a great event that was, started with VMware volunteers for “Habitat for humanity” event where 300 of our finest went to build houses for people who are in need.

Hey, I maybe drinking from my company’s KoolAid  but as @virtualJad says “its a great KoolAid!” . I don’t know any other company that is spending so much time and energy on different charity and giving back to the community initiatives, where people that are involved in different volunteer work are being praised and where each employee can take 40 hours a year to volunteer for community work and there is a lot more.  This is part of the company’s DNA and I am very proud to be in it. read more

vRA tidbit – AWS provisioning and the key pair conundrum

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One of the main advantages of vRealize automation in the Cloud management space is that it provides customers with choices, this is true in many aspects of the solution like where to consume services from, how to deploy them, how the forms will look etc but in this post I want to talk about the creation of AWS key pairs.

There are many solutions out there that provide an interface for provisioning instances to AWS,  some have more capabilities than others and without getting into a full feature by feature comparison I will just say that vRA is one of the more comprehensive solutions out there with many capabilities that are required for cloud management such as self-service portal, multi cloud/vendor provisioning, automation and orchestration capabilities and much more. read more

Quick and easy vRA ASD demo – send email

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Let’s say you want to test vRealize Automation Advanced Service Designer which allows you to create custom services that are based on Orchestrator, sending an email from the vRA catalog is a quick and easy solution to try it out.

The following steps will guide you to create a service that sends an email using the mail notification workflow in the embedded vRO.

Obviously you need to have a fully configured vRA environment including vRO (formerly vCO) , to demonstrate the email being sent and received I used FakeSMTP , which is a small Java application that acts as a mail server and displays incoming emails, pretty neat solution for demos check it out. read more