For over twenty years I’ve run my own servers at home. For slightly less time I also ran my lab from there, so these servers that ran my email, DNS, web services etc I referred to as “production”. Recently I decided that my home was no longer the place to keep my lab, as heating and noise were becoming increasingly more irritating. Shortly after I decided Continue reading
Wednesday Tidbit: Enable the Timing Profiler in VMware View 7.2
On 20 June 2017 VMware released the latest version of Horizon View – 7.2. Whilst this release contained a number of product features and enhancements, one of the ones most helpful to teams supporting VDI implementations in the new Helpdesk Tool Continue reading
Securing VMware applications with Google Authenticator
Earlier this week I created a tenant in HobbitCloud for a friend with his own development company. He needs to leverage the power of Infrastructure-as-a-Service, but is unwilling to move to the public cloud for all his workloads just yet. However, now that HobbitCloud is accessible externally, it was clear I had to increase security. Continue reading
Getting rid of the homelab
Today is a sad day. After just over fifteen years of having a computer lab environment at home, I have decided the time has come to decommission it. The bandwidth and energy requirements have become too much, and I can no longer justify having one in my current role. Continue reading
Uninstall the Horizon View Toolbox before upgrading your Connection Servers
Late last year I worked on a vRealize Automation project for customer in the training industry. They required their users to be able to request a Horizon View desktop from the self-service catalog, and subject to approval, one is provisioned. This week I wanted to replicate this in the lab as a full Desktop-as-a-Service model. Continue reading
Automate All The Things! I’ll be speaking at the Dutch, NE England and Scottish VMUGs
I’ve been lucky enough to be invited to speak at some upcoming VMUGs in The Netherlands, North-East England and Scotland. In my session I’ll be presenting on vRealize Automation, Puppet and Site Recovery Manager. Together with the presentation I will also be doing a hands-on demo (if the demo Gods are with me). Continue reading
Don’t cripple your NSX installation with Host Profiles (and the C# Client)
This week I had an issue with my NSX installation across multiple clusters. First it appeared in my management cluster, then my resource and edge clusters. Little did I know my own stupidity was to blame… Continue reading
Deploying VMware NSX Edge Services using the REST API
Recently I deployed a number of vRealize Automation blueprints that made use of VMware NSX on-demand networking. To ensure virtual machines could route traffic back to the Continue reading
Deploying containers with vRealize Automation 7.2 – Part 1: Containers
This week I have been designing a vRealize Automation 7.2 solution for a customer. One of the things that came out of the solution requirements workshop was the ability for vRA to deploy and potentially manage containers. Whilst I knew it was possible, it encouraged me to look deeper at the technology. Thankfully it wasn’t long before a use case emerged. Continue reading
Ensure your load-balancing is right for a vRealize Automation 7.x HA install
Last week I had cause to build a fully distributed/HA installation of vRealize Automation as a proof-of-concept. After encountering an issue with DTC communication, it led to a question of load-balancer configuration. Not how to do it (VMware have documented this very well), but the order of things. Continue reading
