I recently began looking more closely at cloud-init for customizing VMware guest VMs. This caused me some heachaches! I took various notes while troubleshooting and researching around this. Why Guest OS Customization Is Needed When you clone a virtual machine or deploy a virtual machine from a template it clones the …

VMware Cloud Automation Services is a product suite comprising three products, Cloud Assembly, Service Broker and Code Stream. Cloud Assembly provides a blueprinting engine and manages connectivity to multiple cloud endpoints. Service Broker provides a unified catalog for publishing blueprints with role-based policies. …

Moving towards application centric infrastructure suitable for microservices applications requires a good example application to work with. I saw an NSX demo presented by Yves Fauser where he used just such an application called planespotter. My first task towards understanding this more was to get this setup in my …

Hashicorp Terraform is a tool which enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure by defining its configuration as code. VMware NSX-T is a product which enables software defined network infrastructure. The Terraform NSX-T provider allows us to deliver and maintain NSX-T configuration …

While looking at the various documentation sets I found it difficult to understand the NSX-T and OpenShift integration. A lot was masked by configuration performed by Ansible scripts. Here I try and record my understanding of the technology and then work through getting this running in a capacity constrained lab …

While the NSX for vSphere plugin for vRealize Orchestrator is useful, occasionally there are limitations. For example when creating an NSX Edge Services Gateway we use this method. NSXEdgeTrinityBasicController.createEdgeV4 That method returns void, so next you need to make a second method call using filter by name to …

In 2013 I was a systems engineer, I worked mostly on automation scripting for consistently delivering virtualized infrastructure on VMware. A job I’d enjoyed but was ready to move my career forwards, my at the time colleague Richard Dowling and I started looked into pursuing advanced VMware certification. In …

Having passed the VCAP5-DCD exam with little to no studying only eighteen months ago and VCIX6-NV since. All things considered I was pretty confident of doing well in the VCAP6-DCV Design exam, and when I completed exam I was pretty sure I’d passed. To my surprise I failed the exam with a 285, to make matters …

Encryption of data at rest is a requirement for many customers, with VMware hosted Virtual Machines (VMs) there are two ways to achieve this. VM data can be encrypted using vSAN whole-datastore encryption or using Storage Policy (VMcrypt). Both VM Encryption and vSAN Encryption require a Key Management Interoperability …

The NSX-V Plug-in for vRealize Orchestrator offers some great functionally, however creating custom workflows caused me some headaches. When building some custom workflows using the vRO API explorer there are inconsistencies, I’ve learned to not rely on the vRO API explorer for NSX plug-in documentation and …