I was looking to programaticly configuring VMware Storage Profile recently. My scripting language of choice is Python, VMware maintain pyVmomi is which is the Python SDK for the VMware vSphere API. pyVmomi can be used to form binding and configure the vSphere Web Services API and the VMware Storage Policy API. The …

I’d been exploring Project Pacific during its beta in my homelab for a while. When vSphere 7 and NSX-T 3.0 went GA I took chance to rebuild lab and consolidate much of the configuration I’d been applying iteratively. My lab hardware specification is a constraint so I’ve had to deviate from …

vRealize Automation Cloud and 8.x allows you to deploy and configure cloud agnostic virtual machines. To achieve agnostic in-guest OS customization capability across for on-premises vSphere, AWS, GCP and Azure endpoints cloud-init is used for Linux guests and cloudbase-init is used for Windows guests. Inital Attempt …

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 …

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 …

As it looks like vSphere Integrated Containers will feature a lot at the upcoming VMworld I took the chance to install this and find out more. The documentation available on isn’t extensive, but, contains all I needed to know and I think benefits from being to the point. The files needed to set this up are …

While attempting to setup vRealize Orchestrator 7 at home it soon became clear the documentation isn’t great after much flipping between documents and blog posts I got this installed and working. Here I are the steps I followed. Deploy vRealize Orchestrator Deploy the OVA via web client and specify network …

When creating virtual machine templates I’d like to do this consistently as such I’ll try and keep this post up to date with the settings I am including. CentOS 7 New custom VM named CentOS7, hardware version 11, guest operating system Linux version ‘CentOS 4/5/6/7 (64-bit)’. We’d like a …

Working for a company which develops software for business I’ve been keen on following the story of containers unfold. The explosion of containers and microservices in the software development space has been a revolution in the way applications can be architected and deployed. This has put a great deal of power …

There was announced during VMworld a technology preview for Project Fargo (formerly VMFork) it is likely this will be launched with vSphere6. The aim of Fargo is to provides a fast, scalable differential clone of a running VM. I see this as very similar to Redirect-on-Write (RoW) methodology used by NetApp snapshots …