Recently I decided to move my cloud native workloads from my primary datacentre in Utrecht to the secondary in Southport, UK. After getting NSX-T up and running in my nested compute cluster, it was time to begin the installation of Pivotal Container Service (PKS). As PKS 1.1 had just been released, it made sense to go with the latest version. Continue reading
Wednesday Tidbit: Standing up a Kubernetes cluster in Microsoft Azure
Recently, Microsot announced the GA release of their Public Cloud Kubernetes offering – Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Now DevOps practioners have the ability to stand-up k8s clusters in the cloud and integrate workloads with their existing CI/CD pipelines, without having to go to another provider. Continue reading
Moving vRealize Automation blueprints between environments with vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 1.2
When large enterprises deploy a cloud management platform like VMware vRealize Automation, they often have a number of different environments. To ensure best practices, blueprints and orchestration scripts are created in development before being tested in another environment, before finally being transported into Continue reading
Wednesday Tidbit: Enable VIC-as-a-Service on vRealize Automation with custom SSL certificates
vRealize Automation brings a raft of benefits to an organisation. The biggest of these is the ability to enable users to consume complex services without having to rely on the corporate IT department. An example of this is the ability to provision a Docker endpoint, in the form of a vSphere Integrated Containers Virtual Container Host, for developers to deploy containers against. Continue reading
Deploying Kubernetes with vRealize Automation
A number of customers are very excited about the upcoming release of PKS. However, some are itching to get started with Kubernetes today, and are wondering how they can leverage VMware’s Cloud Management Platform, vRealize Automation, to do so. In this post I will show how you can design a blueprint which with two clicks can deploy a Kubernetes cluster for your users. Continue reading
Wednesday Tidbit: Stop failed vRealize Automation software deployments from auto-deleting
This will quite possibly be the shortest, but yet most useful, posts on vRealize Automation you’ve ever read…
If you regularly develop software components for vRA, you’ve undoubtedly discovered that if for some reason a deployment fails, the machine is automatically deleted within a couple of minutes. This is frustrating as it gives you no time to debug why it failed, as all evidence is deleted with the machine.
Thankfully, Sam McGeown shared the answer a couple of weeks back:
So there you have it. One custom property attached to your blueprint will enable you to see why your deployment failed.
This is one of those things I wished I’da known ages ago!
I’ll be speaking at the UK VMUG UserCon on Thursday 16 November
Next Thursday the UK VMUG UserCon will be held at the National Motorcycle Museum in Birmingham. This is a jam-packed event with speakers covering a wide-range of topics such as digital transformation, end-user computing, containerisation and of course, automation. Continue reading
Building containerized apps through vRealize Automation
As a cloud admin, you need a certain toolset to get the job done. Occasionally these tools are not readily available, or updated ones are released and you need to be able to consume them without too much fuss. Running these apps as containers are often a great way to achieve this, and by far the best way of provisioning them is though vRealize Automation. Continue reading
Vulnerability scanning with VMware Harbor 1.2 and Clair – Part 1: Building Harbor
At VMworld 2017 VMware announced the latest release of vSphere Integrated Containers, version 1.2. This release also included updated versions Admiral, VMware’s container management platform; and Harbor, their enterprise-class container registry. VMware makes all these products available to consume from a single OVA which can be Continue reading
Getting the hell out of Amazon Web Services
If you’re a regular reader of my blog you may recall that in June I made the decision to move my production environment to Amazon Web Services. This was because I no longer fancied running my servers (however small and unobtrusive) at home. At first everything went well – the migration to the cloud was seamless and without any issues. Continue reading
